"Well I don't give a damn about my bad reputation."

[TDarcos]

P.S. There is an awful lot of hating on "LET". On Timex Sinclair you had to use "LET", there was no other choice. It was how the computer worked.

The reason for the "LET" statement was when Basic was invented in 1965, there wasn't much work on things like parsing, and also, these people were working in systems sometimes only having 8L - 4K of ROM, 4K of RAM. Requiring every line start with a keyword makes the job of writing a compiler or interpreter easier. Later people figured how to get around this restriction. I mean, I think there is a correlation between language capability and compiler complexity. The fewer things the person has to do in writing code, the easier it makes their job, and the more complex the compiler has to become.

I can obviously say that the more things you require the programmer to do, the simpler your language processor can be. It's a choice of who does the work, the compiler writer or the application programmer. The difference being the application programmer's workspace is "where the rubber meets the road." The compiler user (programmer) is the one that, in the end, who has to use the language to write their application. Application programmers, unlike compiler writers,  can't push their work onto the user of their program.