Early versions of BASIC did not have the ability to read and write external files. To represent lists of data that would normally be read from a file, BASIC included the codice_12 keyword, which could be followed by an arbitrarily long list of elements, ending only at the limit of the line length. The codice_12 was non-executable and was skipped if encountered. codice_11 commands would consume the data one by one, keeping track of its location within the complete collection of codice_12 elements in an internal pointer. In version 3, a codice_25 command was added to reset the pointer to the first codice_12 command in a program.