And it was an absolute pain if you had to insert a new statement, but didn't have enough space left between line numbers. You had to retype the offending lines with new line numbers.
Dartmouth BASIC had a renumber command. I believe that line renumbering commands and/or utilities were commonly available for microcomputer BASICs as well.
Some BASICs had a RENUM command. They were a bit of a pain as well. As you wrote your program you got to know which line numbers were associated with which statements. Doing a RENUM meant having to relearn the "meaning" of each line number. I'm pretty sure my VZ-200 didn't have the RENUM command.
Yes, most Microsoft ROM BASICs at least 8K in size had the renum command. It was still a pain because you had to figure out the start, end and skip values.
Common practice was to increment line numbers by 10 instead of 1. Would give a bit of wiggle room to add more lines in later without having to renumber everything else.
