[abbeyj]

> Line 3000 starts with REM, short for “remark”. We call them “comments” these days, but the ZX Spectrum is British, the brainchild of mad genius Sir Clive Sinclair.

I'm not sure, but is this statement implying that `REM` is a British invention? The original Darthmouth BASIC had a REM statement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_BASIC#First_Edition

[KayEss]

REM was quite common across a number of languages at the time. You might still see them in '.bat' files

[lproven]

Little fluffy REMs...

[lproven]

Exactly this. This is only one of several mistakes in the piece about Sinclair BASIC. It was the language of the first computer I owned, so I'm still a bit defensive about it.

* REM for Remark is 100% standard usage.

This is true in all BASIC dialects I know of and in DOS batch files and so on.

* Line numbers are not for GOTO and GOSUB.

Line numbers are an elegant abstraction for a teaching language, and for machines with no directly-addressible non-volatile storage.

Type in some valid BASIC, and the computer does it now. Prefix it with a line number, and it _doesn't_ do it now, it remembers it for later. Sequence is controlled by the numbers, so flow of control is explicit, not implicit.

This is much simpler than learning multiple Unix-like abstractions such as "this is a 'file', files have 'file names', to edit the code you must 'load' a 'file' into another separate program called an 'editor', then you 'save' the file to 'disk' and pass its 'file name' to the 'interpreter'."

All that stuff is 1970s minicomputer legacy nonsense, that we have fossilised into our computing culture. Smalltalk banished all this legacy baggage in 1980 but Unix was so dominant that we learned nothing from it.

Kids should not have to know about ludicrous 1970s abstractions such as "files", "programs", "editors", "interpreters", "compilers" and all that DEC PDP-7 nonsense. The computer should come to us, not us to its concepts.

* No ENDIF? No, almost no early-1980s BASIC had ENDIF. BBC BASIC on the BBC Micro is the _only_ one I can think of, and it took 2x the ROM space of Sinclair BASIC -- and that was on top of a separate 16kB ROM chip for the BBC Micro OS, or MOS. Full 50% of the BBC Micro's memory space was consumed by 32kB of ROM. The Spectrum had 50% less ROM and so you got 50% more usable memory.

* The increment of 10 is nothing to do with the Sinclair editor. All BASICs did that.

* "there are no function calls" -- yes there are. DEF FN() worked, as in more or less all 8-bit BASICs.

* "It’s also interpreted, so super slow." -- again, they all were.

These are cavils. It's a great tech demo and I enjoyed reading it!

I guess you were inspired by the recent Acorn Electron demo, as used by the BBC Micro Bot on Mastodon?

https://mastodon.me.uk/@coprolite9000/111762131524979212

[FullyFunctional]

All of this is accurate and just want to add how hard it is to appreciate how revolutionary BASIC was at the time of creation (at Dartmouth, when everything was batch oriented FORTRAN). It was probably the first _widely_ available example of interactive computing, and as we have to come to understand, instant feedback is critical for learning and a boon for productivity.

However, using line numbers for editors wasn't AFAIK unusual at the time and I think making the semantics depend on them was unfortunate. However 20/20 hindsight etc.