My point was that printing, teletype-style terminals don't have an intrinsic vertical space limit like video display terminals (and eventually the printouts can get quite long).

But now that I think about it, perhaps the designers of BASIC might have been thinking of making it easy for a beginner to spend an afternoon or two learning how to write something comparable to a short FORTRAN program that might fit on a small deck of 80 column (72 with sequence number) punched cards.