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Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

Before getting my hands on a BBC Micro I'd done all my teenage programming on an Apple II - so the killer feature of BBC Basic for me was that it had a renumber command. No more having to re-type code because I'd used-up all the line numbers between line 110 and 120. A little thing but it felt like magic.

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I absolutely hated line numbers. In my current paid job I'm paid to develop Visual Basic applications, not a single line number in sight. Basic has certainly come a long way since the 80s.

The nice thing about line numbers is that you didn't have to learn a different code editor for different computer brands. I could walk up to any computer that had BASIC in a department store, and program up my favorite childish prank on every brand:

         10 PRINT "This computer is overheated."
         20 PRINT "WARNING: Computer about to EXPLODE!..."
         30 GO TO 10
         RUN

Newbies walking up saw the active screen, got wide-eyed and walked away quickly. One even called security, as I watched from a distance. Good times!

Structured Basic was already a thing in the 80's, see VMS Basic, or Turbo Basic.

Yes, VMS Basic will be ported to the OpenVMS platform on amd64 fairly soon and will be available next year. I'm one of the lucky few testing OpenVMS on amd64.

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

> No more having to re-type code because I'd used-up all the line numbers between line 110 and 120.

Line numbers are arbitrary, you can just use GOTO to jump to some out-of-line code then GOTO back at the end. It gets a bit spaghetti'ish if you do it lot, though.

Desperate times

Even back in ~1985 I'd have felt bad about such a practice. And I had only the very vaguest notions about "structured programming".

The school I went to only had a cpuple of computers, so I wrote code longhand on A4 lined paper. When I needed to insert lines, I wrote them on a slip of paper that I placed at the appropriate place on the page and stapled on the right-hand edge.

We've certainly come a long way.

Dijkstra ruined programming. >:(

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