Hacker News Reader

The point in BASIC shouldn't be to really teach programming, but just give a kid the thrill of being able to type in something and seeing a computer do it after typing 'RUN'.

You don't need named subroutines for that, at all.

View on HN

Some BASICs did have named functions. Reportedly, The BBC Micro one was an early example, and later BASICs on, say, Atari ST, Amiga and later BASICs on MS-DOS all had them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com