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Comment by agazso | Hacker News Reader

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 :)

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  > 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.

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

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

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