I remember the first Antic disk I bought had a program called LBASIC, which would allow you to write BASIC without line numbers, and using a special label syntax to mark places, much like batch files. It would then compile it into a line-number-ful BASIC listing, which was incredibly inconvenient.
There was also Turbo BASIC, which introduced modern control structures such that you didn't need line numbers as often. Subroutines could be named, multi-line IF/THEN/ELSE statements, and WHILE/WEND, REPEAT/UNTIL, and DO/LOOP. But still no local variables.
My big regret of my childhood was that I never learned any other programming languages, like FORTH. FORTH was great for 8-bits. That would have been a great time to raise my consciousness.
I gave ASM a try on the C=64 w/ some kind of book/tape tutorial, but it was too much for me... either I wasn't smart enough or the materials weren't good enough.
C=64 wasn't the best choice for that as well, I'm afraid.
http://home.iae.nl/users/mhx/sf.html
http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/
There's still time to learn FORTH!