Comment by amiga386

It makes a lot of sense to me.

They key problem is that GO SUB and GO TO are not instantaneous like a CALL or JP instruction would be in Z80. The BASIC interpreter does a linear scan through the entire source code, until it reaches the specified line number. Every time you want to jump or call.

That's why this article is called "Efficient Basic Coding"... all the "tricks" are about moving the most frequently called code to the lowest line numbers, so the interpreter spends as little time scanning the source code destination line numbers as possible.

The second article in the series is on a theme, where variables aren't indexed either, the interpreter scans through each variable in turn until it finds the one with the name referenced in the source code... again you want to define them in order of most frequently accessed...