I was thinking of making a program/app that would "compile" BASIC programs, mostly doing simple optimizations, but also doing more useful things like turning gotos into actual jumps, just like JR in asm. Then it can apply a parser hook and intercept a custom token for compiled gotos. This could eliminate the need for people to compile before testing, because the original gotos would work too, but compiled ones would be much faster. I want to see what y'all think, and if anyone would actually use it.

sounds interesting, good luck.

You've heard of BASIC Builder, right? I guess it would be semi usefull, but just improving goto speed and other optimizations is not nearly enough IMHO.

I think this actually might be the best approach to a new language. If you started out with these simple optimizations and than added more and more features into it like faster randomization, different number systems (like allow the user to compute with 1 byte instead of 9 to drastically improve speeds). Adding more and more gradually over time might be the best/easiest way to make a semi-new language similar to BASIC, yet much faster.

So, to sum that up. I think this would be a good starting point, but the end point should be a new language.