====== Numbered Lines BASIC ======
{{tag>linenumbered}}

This was, we can say, the whole huge first generation of BASIC, from 1964 to early 1990s. Very tipically, such BASICs shared the following characteristics:

  * Each line of a program was preceded by a successive line number and such lines were executed sequentially
  * The execution order was manipulated by explicit jump instructions to another numbered line, such as ''GOTO 290'' and from there execution followed sequentially until the end or another jump.
  * A numbered line could have more than one instruction in most of such BASICs

Line numbers were inherited from the FORTRAN of the days when BASIC was created. They were usual in many other languages by then, and in fact the idea of a sequence of instructions and jumps comes very directly from machine code and Assembly.

Some newer BASICs kept support to numbered-line programming just for compatibility with older code, but did not really //require// line numbers to work anymore. These are not "line-numbered BASICs" in the context of this site.