Ick. I guess I'm spoiled; back in the early 1980s I had the pleasure of using BASIC09. It had the grungy control flow if you felt the need, but also had procedu

Ick. I guess I'm spoiled; back in the early 1980s I had the pleasure of using BASIC09. It had the grungy control flow if you felt the need, but also had procedures (with actual local variables), decent control flow (save that you were stuck with ON <expr> (GOTO|GOSUB) rather than a reasonable switch (wasn't it called SELECT in other structured BASICs?) ), an integer and a Boolean type, and the moral equivalent of structures (though you had to redeclare them in each function they were used in, which was a bit of a pain and a possible source of error). It compiled to an intermediate code in the manner of Pascal P-code... and it ran on the 6809. That I'd be willing to consider suggesting for kids to use, at least when I'm not thinking they should be started on Haskell before they're corrupted by imperative languages. :)