Oh, I can't say that it didn't. But I was only 7, and more amused by things like

  10 PRINT "POOP"
  20 GOTO 10

than, what, reading a non-existant manual? My parents weren't programmers, so I learned by stumbling in the dark.

But, you've got me curious. I recall using BASICA, GWBASIC and QBASIC -- reading over their respective histories, I'd have gotten my start on BASICA on a hand-me-down 286. I'm not finding good docs on the language, but a familiar program [1] uses FOR loops -- so they were supported. But I distinctly recall hand-rolling a for-equivalent loop with GOTO and IF, counting down to zero.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130918210121/http://www.coding...