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There is historical precedent - BASIC originally required line numbers for all lines, and GOTO could jump to any of them. Later versions made line numbers optio
by dTal 10y ago
There is historical precedent - BASIC originally required line numbers for all lines, and GOTO could jump to any of them. Later versions made line numbers optional, so it became a common idiom to only put a line number on a line you needed to jump to. In TI-BASIC this went further - line numbers were dropped entirely and you jumped to "labels", which could be named as well as numbered.
- pvg 10y agoThat's not really the same thing since a big part of the reason BASIC had numbers on every line was to facilitate interactive, line-based editing, not to make them all targets for GOTO. FORTRAN had numerical labels for flow control by that point.