For all I can tell, BASIC seems to have been designed for line-by-line interpretation.
Not just that… According to chapter 3.5 of “Basic for Beginners” by Gateley and Bitter:
The computer will take all the statements of a program as they are typed and arrange them in order according to the sizes of the line numbers. Therefore one does not need to type the program in the order in which it is to be executed. If two statements in a program have the same line number, the first one typed will be replaced by the second. This is a very convenient feature, as it allows us to correct statements at any time and also to insert statements where we wish as we write the program. … You may delete a statement by typing a blank statement having the same line number.
That’s how they did it with paper tape. Later versions got rid of the sorting, and made line numbers optional, but I think they kept the line-by-line execution in a global environment.
For all I can tell, BASIC seems to have been designed for line-by-line interpretation.
As someone who cut their teeth on Locomotive BASIC (on an Amstrad CPC 464), that was most certainly the plan at the time :)
Relatedly: I think the thing I love the most about Common Lisp programming with SLIME is that it’s spiritually a return to the immediacy of an interactive BASIC prompt … just with a degree more power that would have been unimaginable at the time.
Edited: well, unimaginable at least to anyone without access to a Lisp Machine ;-P
Not just that… According to chapter 3.5 of “Basic for Beginners” by Gateley and Bitter:
That’s how they did it with paper tape. Later versions got rid of the sorting, and made line numbers optional, but I think they kept the line-by-line execution in a global environment.
As someone who cut their teeth on Locomotive BASIC (on an Amstrad CPC 464), that was most certainly the plan at the time :)
Relatedly: I think the thing I love the most about Common Lisp programming with SLIME is that it’s spiritually a return to the immediacy of an interactive BASIC prompt … just with a degree more power that would have been unimaginable at the time.
Edited: well, unimaginable at least to anyone without access to a Lisp Machine ;-P