Structured BASICs are great.

Not only they were quite productive as dynamic languages, they also had optional typical and AOT compilation, besides the rich libraries for start coding right away.

One thing that many might be unaware is that the original Dartmouth BASIC was actually JIT based, the pure interpreted versions only came to be due to fitting it into 8 bit home computers.

My concern with attempting to learn BASIC is that at least the big ones aren't garbage collected (freebasic, qb64).

In the first place (not growing up using BASIC) I don't understand how BASIC got so big as a programming language for beginners (even kids) without a GC.

Or maybe my searches just haven't turned up the right implementation or something.

I have the same issue with (Free)Pascal but I'm less surprised there because it's not like (apparently, since like I said this wasn't me) everyone as a kid learned to game program with Pascal the same way they did with BASIC.

Because it actually had a lightweight GC for strings and arrays.

8 bit home micros lacked more complex data structures.

And when they migrated to 16 bits, and grew structures, usually you couldn't do indirection with pointers/references, only have a single level of array of structures. For anything more complex you had to use indexes.

Pointers were only use for low level coding, changing specific memory locations.

Then by the time of VB and Real Basic, proper GC was already widespread among modern BASIC dialects.

Why would garbage collection be an issue? All the best BASIC variants either do have GC, or they have manual methods of dealing with garbage, which as the programmer you can always automate.

I don't consider manual memory management great for beginning programmers and I don't even like doing it when I'm not a beginner programmer.

But why do you think the lack of GC is a showstopper for using the language for learning purposes? Or am I misunderstanding your comment?

As long as you're not messing with memory directly (i.e. dynamic allocation), the OS will clean up after your program exits.

Yes dynamic allocation is exactly what I'm concerned about. Deserializing text for example.