Line numbers. My father was a computer science teacher, and when I was very young (5, or 6), I used to look at the example programs that his students had writt

Line numbers. My father was a computer science teacher, and when I was very young (5, or 6), I used to look at the example programs that his students had written, and that he was grading at home. The exercises were were written in Pascal, and I just really had trouble grokking how the computer knew in which order to execute things. Even just the simple question of being able to identify where execution was going to start was a non-trivial exercise. Line number based BASIC is much easier for a child to understand. You start at the top, and start reading. I remember that in my head I had an image of me writing 'stories' for the computer to read. A (very) few years later, the question of order of execution was obvious to me, but I clearly remember those times in the lounge room looking at print outs of Pascal, and not being able to figure out what the program was going to do.