BBC Basic was a work of genius (it was written by Sophie Wilson of ARM fame) but not necessarily of concise code. I remember looking at some of the assembly in

BBC Basic was a work of genius (it was written by Sophie Wilson of ARM fame) but not necessarily of concise code. I remember looking at some of the assembly in the 1980s and it was clear that code size was secondary to speed - there was some significant loop unrolling for example. Absolutely agree on the hardware point as Sinclair's real talent was squeezing as much out of basic hardware as possible even at the expense of performance (e.g. CPU driving the screen in ZX80/81). As a commercial decision limiting the ROM to 16k was a very good move in the end for Sinclair. It allowed full colour with 42k of spare RAM whereas the BBC only had c24k after allowing for screen memory, so in the end the Spectrum could support much larger and richer games than the BBC and (later) the Electron.