https://bobcopeland.com/blog/tags/basic-hate/ Recent content in Basic-Hate on Insignificant Bits Hugo en-US Fri, 26 Oct 2012 20:01:16 +0000 https://bobcopeland.com/blog/2012/10/goto-in-bash/ Fri, 26 Oct 2012 20:01:16 +0000 http://bobcopeland.com/blog/?p=1880 <p>If you are as old and nerdy as I, you may have spent your grade school days hacking in the BASIC computer language. One of the (mostly hated) features of the (mostly hated) language was that any statement required a line number; this provided both the ability to edit individual lines of the program without a screen editor, as well as de facto labels for the (mostly hated) GOTO and GOSUB commands. But you could also use line numbers to run your program starting from any random point: &ldquo;RUN 250&rdquo; might start in the middle of a program, typically after line 250 exited with some syntax error and was subsequently fixed.</p>