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Comment by mattmcknight | Hacker News Reader

"It was great! I could put GOTO on an empty line and write additional code on a separate piece of paper. I know all programmers are laughing reading this, but I was happy that I didn't have to squeeze several lines of code into one line in the notepad anymore!"

That reminds me of line numbers, counting by 10s, and then using line 15 if you needed to put something in between 10 and 20. I am just glad I discovered gosub before goto.

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Ah, I remember doing that, and writing code on paper. I had a green Mead spiral notebook full of TI-BASIC code. Then I would sit and type it into the computer (a TI99) and then save it to tape... which was an actual audio cassette tape, in a separate tape player, with the mic input shoved up next to the computer's speaker.

My dad and his friend, who also had a TI99 would transmit programs back and forth to each other over the 2 meter HAM bands late at night. One of them would hold the radio mic keyed next to the computer's speaker and the other would be holding the radio speaker up to the mic input on the computer.

BBC BASIC had "RENUMBER" which would renumber your lines for you if things started getting tight!

If I recall correctly, RENUMBER only renumbered lines, but not the GOTO and GOSUB labels, so it was pretty useless after all :)

The best thing you could do was to stick to the practice of labeling by multiples of ten, and if you needed to hack something, you could still do it in one or two lines.

But basically programming in BASIC was hacking :)

Apparently it had quite strange semantics, presumably for ease of implementation:

http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcbasic/manual/bbckey4.html#renum...

  > If I recall correctly, RENUMBER only renumbered
  > lines, but not the GOTO and GOSUB labels, so it
  > was pretty useless after all :)

You remember incorrectly. I've just gone and confirmed that the labels and references are all changed.

FWIW, we've had BBC BASIC programs running commercially in the field in a semi-embedded context for over ten years and they are still running perfectly. It's perfectly possible to do structured progamming in BBC BASIC.

If you issued a RENUMBER command with sufficiently nonsensical parameters (you gave it, I think, the first line number and the increment), the result was the error message "Silly.", which was (1) unusually casual-sounding and (2) not mentioned anywhere in the manuals. I can still remember the brief flash of OMG-it's-alive panic that hit me when my computer first told me I was silly.

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