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by versteegen 619 days ago
Trivia: at least in some BASICs (QBasic, QuickBasic, FreeBASIC) it's not necessary for every GOSUB to be matched with a RETURN, since the GOSUB is a single 'call' instruction that pushes onto the stack (and RETURN is a single 'ret' instruction, hence GOSUB-RETURN is highly efficient!) so it gets removed when you exit the function if you didn't RETURN, like alloca(). I actually re-implemented GOSUB this way using macros and inline assembly. I called it GOSUB/RETRACE.
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In Wang BASIC, there was the "RETURN CLEAR" statement which cleared the stack up to and including the most recent GOSUB call frame. This includes any FOR loop frames that were push on the stack in the subroutine before the GOSUB. This was intended to be used for handling error conditions.

https://www.wang2200.org/basic_comparison.html#retclear