I kind of like the uppercase keywords of older programming languages, it makes the non-code parts standout more, probably even more important before syntax highlighting became common

This reminds me immensely of DARK Basic built by The Game Creators. It was how I got my start into programming back in the day.

Nice. A BASIC for game development takes me back to AMOS on the Commodore Amiga.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMOS_(programming_language)

This is neat! I know it's not really the point but I would like to see some shallow benchmarks, I'm curious what perf (if any) is lost building like this.

My very first apps were written in LibertyBASIC, almost 30 years ago. I learned how to pirate things because the borland compiler required to share my creations with my friends was $299, which was a lot of money back then.