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Not so. For example, newlines and semi-colons have special meanings in file operations and printing output. Also, BBC BASIC doesnt use GOSUB labels, so you can only GOSUB to the beginning of a newline-delineated line, similar to GOTO.

Yes, I see how the two are similare enough so as to be interchangeable. Maybe, if you don't want your program to run.

If you can't code in C you can't code.
[...]
C should be _every_ programmers second language at the latest.

Nonsense. I use assembler* for low level stuff and Prolog/Basic**/Fortran/Python for high level stuff.

No need for stinking curly braces languages here for over 35 years.

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* Assembler should be every programmer's second programming language - it was my first programming language (well, actually hexcode was).
** That's BBC Basic, where you can just write assembler in your Basic program.

I still believe a modern update of BBC BASIC would be an excellent tool for schoolchildren to learn the fundamentals of programming.

You mean like this?

BASIC is an awful language

You obviously never used BBC BASIC, which had procedures, functions, repeat until, do while, case, local variables, recursion, inline assembler... Hey, it still exists.

I was disappointed to see you refer to BBC BASIC in the past tense, when it's still used today and still has the neat features such as a built-in assembler. In fact the latest version of BBC BASIC for Windows was released at the beginning of this year. There's a list of some of the more interesting and surprising applications of BBC BASIC over the last 28 years or so at http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcbasic/birthday/

Actually the token for print, pR and ? is the byte $99 in cbm basic. It did tokenise keywords, but variable names were left as two alphanumeric characters (not so efficient - iirc a linear search was involved for every single variable access but i could be wrong).

And "everyone" knows that the BBC basic was the best one around in the early 1980s :-)