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I learned to program on a BASIC system that had only one. Although strings were suffixed with $, so you could have both A and A$. Did I also mention that only upper case was available?

Applesoft BASIC (for the Apple ][e) was like this too.

Yes, because both apple and commodore license microsoft basic as the core of their basic implementations.

Wow, I'd actually forgotten that.

I can still see that old VIC-20:

3583 BYTES FREE

READY.

In MUMPS, only the first two characters of function names are significant.