What type of computer should I buy?

The downside of type-ins was labor. The work required to enter a medium-sized type-in was on the order of hours. If the resulting program turned out not to be to the user's taste, it was quite possible that the user spent more time keying in the program than using it. Additionally, type-ins were error-prone, both for users and for the magazines. This was especially true of the machine language parts of BASIC programs, which were nothing but line after line of DATA statements (or in some cases where the computer's version of the ASCII code had a printable character for each value from 0-255, the code could have been printed using strings that contained the glyphs that the values mapped to); while a BASIC program would often stop with an error at an incorrect statement, the machine language parts of a program could fail in untraceable ways. This made the correct entry of programs difficult.