[yourapostasy]

Oy vey, "no chance" is putting it lightly.

A lot of this BASIC code had roots in the 1960's-70's. Back then, editors ruled the roost of print magazines where this code often showed up within, and in books of collections of code they especially ruled with an iron fist. There was little notion that source code had to be dropped in verbatim with absolutely zero changes, so editors would make "judicious" changes in the source code. They thought they were "helping" with "obvious" typographical and editorial decisions.

This lesson was slowly, painfully learned until material improvements across the industry started to take hold starting in the 1980's and realization that source code shouldn't be touched in print really began to permeate the print industry. Though sometimes I wonder if this dynamic spurred the rise of BBS' and helped loosen the stranglehold print media had upon source code distribution, and what an alternative timeline might have looked like if the ones in power in print media were more open to "outsiders" having absolute control over some portion of "their" content.

I learned all the above decades later after I first started playing around with coding as a child, from talking with a much older friend who rose up from within the print media world and saw what happened. When I was a child, with zero adult guidance, and only a handful of books from the school and community library about programming, it was a wonder I stuck with coding at all with the countless programs I typed in by hand from print media that were similarly riddled with errors, so your reminiscing brought back powerful memories.

[Elucalidavah]

> They thought they were "helping" with "obvious" typographical and editorial decisions

Sounds completely baffling. How does that thought process even work? What did they think the code meant? What changes did they make, anyway? Did they learn to not touch math equations before?

[yourapostasy]

> How does that thought process even work?

As it was explained to me, it was territory marking/office politics. Editors back then were very powerful when it came to decisions on content. They did not take kindly to anyone explaining/telling them they had no control over any portion of the content.

> What did they think the code meant?

This gets interesting. They were told it was for the computers, but upon seeing high level language artifacts that looked vaguely like English words, they grabbed their red marking pens and leapt into action, absolutely certain they were in the right as they had always been in the past. This was at the very beginning. Later, it got more nuanced.

> What changes did they make, anyway?

Early incidents had stories of galleys using non-proportional font forced to change to proportional font simply due to aesthetics. Red pens changing the contents of PRINT statements (because it said "print", and that was their domain, right?). Even later with more lessons learned and nuances started to creep in, this was way before programmer fonts made the scene, and the typical goofs one would expect from manual transcription were rampant. The pipelines did not exist yet back then for a long time to take raw source code and dump them into the non-digital typesetting systems at the time, so it was all laboriously transcribed from printouts by non-technical staff.

> Did they learn to not touch math equations before?

Very little cross-pollination of editors experienced with math-heavy technical writing, and those overseeing print products popularizing BASIC programming. BYTE magazine was revolutionary at the time for realizing this, and even they had some gaffs from time to time.