That is it : I am becoming a programmer.

[Sysman]

DEC = licence to print money !

It was at one time. I came across more than one company who made a lot of money out of competing with their sky high prices.

[NickFitz]

I miss BASIC on my ZX spectrum 48k

oh happy days

BBC BASIC was great because it supported named procedures and functions, and multiline control structures like repeat...until. If you wanted to get your head around Structured Programming (which was still a fairly new concept in the non-computer-scientist realm in those days), it was thoroughly supportive.

Its major failings were that it still used line numbers and didn't support multiline if...then...else... constructs. Still, having to put all your if...then...else... stuff on one line encouraged one to move the action of the then and else clauses into named procedures: another win, if only by dint of working around a limitation, for encouraging the habit of structuring one's code using meaningful names.

And of course, if it hadn't been for BBC BASIC's built-in Assembler, we might never have had Elite, the original version of which was written therewith

[threaded]

BBC BASIC was great because it supported named procedures and functions, and multiline control structures like repeat...until. If you wanted to get your head around Structured Programming (which was still a fairly new concept in the non-computer-scientist realm in those days), it was thoroughly supportive.

Its major failings were that it still used line numbers and didn't support multiline if...then...else... constructs. Still, having to put all your if...then...else... stuff on one line encouraged one to move the action of the then and else clauses into named procedures: another win, if only by dint of working around a limitation, for encouraging the habit of structuring one's code using meaningful names.

And of course, if it hadn't been for BBC BASIC's built-in Assembler, we might never have had Elite, the original version of which was written therewith

I programmed in a language that had loops like a 'begin, while, repeat' . Very useful, and it's often amusing to see how people manage it in other languages.