Right -- and there is a hugely important consequence of this design for people learning to program:
It was almost impossible to enter a syntactically incorrect program. Because the keyboard routines were doing the work of what would now be a lexer and parser.
The keyboard would only let you enter syntactically valid code.
One other nostalgia side-effect; where many games for eight bit computers used Q-A-O-P-<Space> for directional controls plus action, Sinclair games typically defaulted to Q-A-O-P-M, as a result.
Yes, there were occasional instances of "C Nonsense in BASIC" errors, but that was for very specific cases. Mostly, the cursor would change to a flashing question mark if you tried to enter something syntactically incorrect.
It was almost impossible to enter a syntactically incorrect program. Because the keyboard routines were doing the work of what would now be a lexer and parser.
The keyboard would only let you enter syntactically valid code.
One other nostalgia side-effect; where many games for eight bit computers used Q-A-O-P-<Space> for directional controls plus action, Sinclair games typically defaulted to Q-A-O-P-M, as a result.