I'm starting to understand it.
I guess it is becuase when I did this sort of programming it was "Level 2 BASIC" on my old TRS-80 - for those of you who can remember those things.
I did a bit of Z80 programming with it as well.
Then I did a bit of "AREXX" programming which was basically a version of REXX.
Had fun with that too, but the machine died and so that kind of stopped as well. 
Now I am into Arduino and there is a whole new set of commands I have to get my head around.