title: Why BASIC had numbered lines?
body: <blockquote>
    <p><strong>Possible Duplicate:</strong><br>
    <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/541421/why-did-we-bother-with-line-numbers-at-all">Why did we bother with line numbers at all?</a>  </p>
  </blockquote>
  
  
  
  <p>I'm curious about why early versions of the BASIC programming language had line numbering like in:</p>
  
  <pre><code>42 PRINT "Hello world!"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The text editors back then had no line numbering?</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: Yes, I know they are used for GOTOs, but why? I mean having labels was too computationally expensive?</p>