>> If that's actually true, that would make it usefully more
>> sophisticated than, say, Spectrum or C64 BASIC.
>
> A little googling shows this to actually be true. The following link is
> part of the BBC Micro user guide (back in the days when you actually got
> a useful book with computers)

Ah yes, I remember those days.

I don't know if you can find it with Google, but the Sam Coupe had an 
especially nice user guide, with little epigraphs and cartoon graphics 
and all sorts. Then again, the Sam Coupe was a rather nice (yet 
surprisingly unknown) machine...

> - scroll down to "LOCAL":

A cursory skim of the manual quickly reveals that *this* dialect of 
BASIC allows you to define procedures and functions (as well as the 
local variables you cite). This makes it much more sophisticated than 
most of the BASIC dialects of the time. It qualifies as a structured 
language, while most BASIC dialects were unstructured. This entails a 
significant increase in power.

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