Not sure why you're digging this hole, but okay... You claim to have 40 years experience, a retired software dev.... BASIC has little relevance to the article OP posted... It doesn't make much sense to post a hello world loop, further you can search for this loop and find thousand of syntax accurate examples, which any engineer would do normally, due to the PTSD of posting on public forums and being ripped to shreds for the most minor of typo...
Why would you claim to run two lines through a compiler to check it? I mean there are endless interpreters and plenty of IDEs that would have caught the mistake as well.
BASIC is a high level educational language to promote CS in the 80s and 90s, What does posting this here, and then misusing semi-colons, do to give you any credibility. Why not Lisp, COBOL or Fortran? Is it because your trying to steal credibility like Microsoft did? Make it make sense!
And finally what in the world is this CC signature. Your on Lemmy, the not-for-profit decentralized forum. Creative Commons licensing is for scenarios that involve commerce. Everything anyone posts here is free to use because there really is no way to enforce copyright on content where the owner cannot be identified and no single entity owns the federation. Unless Cosmic Cleric is your legal name...