A significant change in BASIC XL concerned the handling of line number lookups in GOTO/GOSUB and FOR...NEXT loops. In Atari BASIC, any GOTO had to search the entire program for the provided line number, and FOR...NEXT loops used the same code. In contrast, Microsoft BASIC included a small additional bit of logic that could search forward from the current line number for a small boost in performance, but much more importantly, used the address of the FOR line rather than its line number when performing NEXT, offering an enormous performance boost. These two differences made MS BASIC much faster than Atari in the common case where the program used a number of loops.