4 ms·

It mentions that people are using character limiting techniques, is there some minifying tools to help achieve this or are they writing this code free hand? Thi

It mentions that people are using character limiting techniques, is there some minifying tools to help achieve this or are they writing this code free hand? This seems totally incomprehensible. I suppose if I knew BBC BASIC it would likely be a different story. This is cool to see, though it all looks like dark magic to me.

thunkymonkey 6y ago
Many of the tweets are encoded in base2048, to squeeze the most out of the 288 character limit. Paste the base2048 into the editor at https://bbcmic.ro/ https://bbcmic.ro/ and click 'expand'. Expanding it a second time will elongate any abbreviated BASIC keywords.
crtasm 6y ago
I never went very deep into coding on the 'Micro but can remember or work out a lot of the abbreviations they're using - (graphics) MO(DE), F(OR), C(OLOUR), etc. Replace colons with a newline to make it easier to read. Byte tokens are new to me (well - I probably saw them in source code but didn't know what I was looking at) but with the lookup table seems it'd be fairly easy to do a manual minifying step. I should get mine out of the attic and try typing some of these in! (Colour composite output might be a quick solder away: https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2016-01-12-composite-video-for-bbc.htm https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2016-01-12-composi... ) edit: there's also a 'shrink/expand' tool in the editor :-)
- jameshart 6y ago
  This is a good blog post explaining some of the golfing techniques applicable to BBC BASIC: https://blog.mousefingers.com/post/bbc/bbc_golf/ https://blog.mousefingers.com/post/bbc/bbc_golf/
  - crtasm 6y ago
    Good site, the following post shows a step by step minification of a program and how to make effects with colour cycling.
rbanffy 6y ago
When I programmed in BASIC for the Apple II there were some tools to optimize code - cramming everything possible in single lines and making variable names shorter increased speed a little and made the memory footprint of the program smaller. I'm sure the BBC had similar tools.

thunkymonkey 6y ago

Many of the tweets are encoded in base2048, to squeeze the most out of the 288 character limit. Paste the base2048 into the editor at https://bbcmic.ro/ https://bbcmic.ro/ and click 'expand'. Expanding it a second time will elongate any abbreviated BASIC keywords.

crtasm 6y ago

I never went very deep into coding on the 'Micro but can remember or work out a lot of the abbreviations they're using - (graphics) MO(DE), F(OR), C(OLOUR), etc. Replace colons with a newline to make it easier to read. Byte tokens are new to me (well - I probably saw them in source code but didn't know what I was looking at) but with the lookup table seems it'd be fairly easy to do a manual minifying step. I should get mine out of the attic and try typing some of these in! (Colour composite output might be a quick solder away: https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2016-01-12-composite-video-for-bbc.htm https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2016-01-12-composi... ) edit: there's also a 'shrink/expand' tool in the editor :-)

jameshart 6y ago
This is a good blog post explaining some of the golfing techniques applicable to BBC BASIC: https://blog.mousefingers.com/post/bbc/bbc_golf/ https://blog.mousefingers.com/post/bbc/bbc_golf/
- crtasm 6y ago
  Good site, the following post shows a step by step minification of a program and how to make effects with colour cycling.

rbanffy 6y ago

When I programmed in BASIC for the Apple II there were some tools to optimize code - cramming everything possible in single lines and making variable names shorter increased speed a little and made the memory footprint of the program smaller. I'm sure the BBC had similar tools.