Ken,

I'm not aware of the inner details, maybe Roberto will give you more details on Monday (he is out for 2 days).
What I know is that we always try to give functionalities easy to use and understand, al least we try. This means that many times a thinBasic function does what other languages do in many lines of code. The main reason is because thinBasic is an interpreter so the less lines of code, the better in terms of execution speed. But also because an interpreter must give results immediatelly with few lines of code because, as a user, if I'm working with an interpreter one of the reasons is that I want to see some results quite soon

Ciao
Eros