It's a great language if you want to write a compiler for fun: You can add the different statements incrementally, so you quickly get to a point where you can compile your first program and then add more and more features to compile more and more.

Also, when I was implementing FOR, my first naive implementation was compiling the body first, then append the loop related things that check the conditional and jump backwards to the start of the body. "Hang on, what about the case when the condition is initially false?" I thought, only to discover that the BASIC standard actually specifies that a FOR loop runs at least once, even if the condition is false! Officially, the language is advertised as for beginners, but to me it looks like it was meant as a lingua franca of computers, as in not only easy to understand, but also easy to implement.

Here's a BASIC compiler for the HP 15-C calculator written in Idris: https://gitlab.com/michaelzinn/voyc/-/blob/master/src/Compil...