From an old guy who can remember pre PC ... Yeah! And all the assumptions of carefully considered invention/design for PC Basics ... ha ha ha ;) The various BA

From an old guy who can remember pre PC ... Yeah! And all the assumptions of carefully considered invention/design for PC Basics ... ha ha ha ;) The various BASICs were copies of what came before, and what came before had line numbers. As per the old joke ... "Why do ducks have feathers?" answer "Because their parents had feathers." Look to the early interactive BASICs (wikipedia has a detailed article on Dartmouth BASIC) - line numbers were a convenient way to identify lines for editing and for control flow.