[wvenable]

To be honest, I don't think BASIC makes a good command line. It's been done but it's not really that great.

As someone who computed in the DOS era, programmed in BASIC, and even installed different command interpreters with more features -- I never once thought that BASIC would have made this better.

The other factor was actually disk and memory size -- you want to keep things as minimal as possible to keep things running fast. When your command line interpreter is reloaded from floppy disk every time you return from a program, you want that to be fast.