Oh yeah! That is actually how I learned to write code. They would have the same program in various flavors of BASIC.

Actually, the way it finally started to click for me what the commands were doing was when I was at school where they had a TRS-80 and a stack of PC Computing magazines. There was a particular program that I wanted to write, but it was only available in Apple BASIC.

So line by line I looked through the TRS-80 manual and managed to translate the differences. It took me like a week. (The teachers were scared of the computer, but let me use it all I wanted, since no one else would touch it)

I was amazed when the program actually ran, but not impressed when I saw how lame the actual game was. Lol! At least I learned something, though.