> I got started in QBASIC and, for all the damage it may have caused, I'm doing pretty OK today Dijkstra wrote that quote about a very different flavor of BASI

> I got started in QBASIC and, for all the damage it may have caused, I'm doing pretty OK today Dijkstra wrote that quote about a very different flavor of BASIC: only line numbers, flow control was only possible with GOTO and a limited version of FOR/NEXT, IF was limited to a single line of code (which 99% was just a GOTO or GOSUB), subroutines were made using GOSUB/RETURN, etc, essentially it was a glorified assembler with an expression generator. What he was championing instead (at the time) was structured programming in the style of Algol and QBASIC, with its subroutines, control structures, functions, lack of line numbers (well, they were optional for backwards compatibility with GW-BASIC, but i do not think it got much use) etc, is way closer to the style of programming used in Algol than to the style used in the BASIC that he was talking about.