Did they? Yes. They do even today. To wit:
% cat bad.lsp
(defun triple (X)
"Compute three times X." ; Inline comments can
(* 3 X)) ; be placed here.
;;
;; Negate the sign of a number
;;
(defun negate (X)
"Negate the value of X." ; This is a documentation string.
((- X))
;; main
(format t "hello world ~a~%" (triple (negate 2)))
I've even left included comments in subtly broken example so it is easy to understand. Now when you go compile it with GNU Common Lisp compiler:
% gcl -compile bad.lsp
Compiling bad.lsp.
Error: END-OF-FILE :STREAM #<input stream #p"bad.lsp">
Fast links are on: do (si::use-fast-links nil) for debugging
Signalled by APPLY.
%
Granted gcl-2.6.12 on my Debian Buster system has last been updated in 2006, with no real source changes since 2002, but still much more recent than 1980s.
(BTW Fix is trivial in this example, just remove the erroneous parenthesis. It might be nontrivial to find correct one if the program was not so trivial as this one)
Also note that few languages popular today (like SQL, RegEx etc) do not even have a concept of line numbers (even if users often split them to multiple lines for readability). True, often they are interpreted, but in some cases they are compiled, and you won't be helped much by knowing that the error is in the only line of your split-into-hundreds-lines-with-comments-regex.