I recall starting to program in BASIC on CP/M and ZX-Spectrum machines and they didn't have procedures, only GOTO. Just like assembler, you can use all the JMP you want and not use structured programming and procedures but ... it will all become an unmaintainable mess in short time.
Very likely in a number of alternate futures (if not all of them), given the original set of CPU instructions, people would gravitate naturally to C and not some GOTO spaghetti or message passing or object oriented whatever.
I remember jumping out of gosub on the Apple ][ and eventually running into an out of memory error as the stack on the 255 byte page $01 overflowed. As math was also done on the stack math functions broke. Simplifying expressions only delayed the inevitable doom. I had to abandon the project and only later understood my first encounter with a memory leak.
The BASICs of the time often had GOSUB which remembered the return address. Also, while the stack not being prominent in the high level language, they very well used one on the assembly level. For example on the C64 (probably other 6502/6510 based systems) it always started at $100 ($ being the old convention of writing hex), right after the zeropage.
Yeah, I think it was but I was just starting in programming and GOSUB didn't made much sense to me as it's not a proper structured programming procedure with input and output params but more like a hack with data passed through global variables. And by the time I learned structured programming I already moved to Pascal (HiSoft Pascal : https://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Hisoft_Pascal ) and there was no turning back to BASIC.
Very likely in a number of alternate futures (if not all of them), given the original set of CPU instructions, people would gravitate naturally to C and not some GOTO spaghetti or message passing or object oriented whatever.