Old BASIC implementations often stored the code in a tokenized form to reduce the memory the code needs and to slightly speed up interpretation. One fun issue

Old BASIC implementations often stored the code in a tokenized form to reduce the memory the code needs and to slightly speed up interpretation. One fun issue on C64's BASIC was that you could force the interpreter to not tokenize lines, but they were printed verbatim on "list" - totally invisible to the user. Printing the line, then having BASIC parse the same output fixed the issue. Although the error was pretty obvious IIRC (some fatal interpreter error aborting operation). I'm not sure what the TI machines did. There may have been some odd tokenization error in that line and by rewriting it, you kicked off the parser which made the bug go away.