>I believe Microsoft's 'regression of progress' goes further back. BASIC is the real culprit. Nobody needed line numbers and goto statements, yet hobby and home

>I believe Microsoft's 'regression of progress' goes further back. BASIC is the real culprit. Nobody needed line numbers and goto statements, yet hobby and home computers from the 8 bit era were invariably burdened with lousy variants of MicroSoft BASIC. Including the Commodore things, even if they did not say Microsoft on boot up, they were. The Atari 800 series had a unique BASIC with unusual string-handling conventions and graphic and sound commands miles ahead of the vanilla Commodore (pre-7.0) dialects. I don't blame them for line numbers. Remember that the earliest hobbyist machines were going to be connected to who-knows-what display devices, even literal teletypes, where you might not have been able to support a full-screen editor or a convenient way to differentiate immediate versus program commands. Line numbers give you workarounds to those problems. It could be argued they languished too long-- perhaps BASICA/GWBASIC, built for a machine with standard robust display controllers and ample ROM and address space-- should have been more like QuickBasic-- but f you wanted a box-checking 8k BASIC for your new microcomputer, it's not an awful choice.