4 ms·

> comment lines before subroutines would help. That code looks normal to me. I have a ton of BASIC books and magazines. You're talking about a time period befo

> comment lines before subroutines would help. That code looks normal to me. I have a ton of BASIC books and magazines. You're talking about a time period before full screen text editors were a thing. It's almost impossible to explain to anyone that didn't have to work with TI-99 BASIC, C64 BASIC, GW-BASIC/BASICA, etc. what it was like. Once you got to QBASIC/QuickBASIC it was done. Life was easy. A few years before that, and you're printing out pages on a dot matrix printer and going line-by-line to debug. You'll notice a distinct lack of white space between lines and that comments start with "REM" and a line number. You didn't even get labels for lines. The code looks like that because those were technology limits on really rudimentary devices. You were editing code inside the BASIC interpreter, often using some command like "LIST <line#>". It was awful. We take so much for granted today. Dual monitors. Color. More than 80x25 character display. Multiple screens and multitasking. Just getting to Linux in '95 and having F1/F2/F3/etc. switching terminals was a huge deal.

jamiek88 4y ago
Wasting RAM on REM’s was just rookie stuff. I remember chasing bytes with short variable names, abbreviated print statements, reducing spaces as much as possible etc. I had like 28k to play with and I was 14 years old!
- worthless-trash 4y ago
  And we liked it !
- kbelder 4y ago
  I remember in Commodore basic, finding that a period by itself ('.') was parsed as zero, but was actually slightly faster than using zero, and saved a byte every time it was used. In other words, you could write: 10 for i = . to 6.28 step 0.1:next and it would be slightly faster and smaller than 10 for i = 0 to 6.28 step 0.1:next Made for some ugly inner loops, but you gotta do what you gotta do. For that matter, we certainly would have removed some of those extra spaces as well. Bytes mattered and whitespace slowed you down.

jamiek88 4y ago

Wasting RAM on REM’s was just rookie stuff. I remember chasing bytes with short variable names, abbreviated print statements, reducing spaces as much as possible etc. I had like 28k to play with and I was 14 years old!

worthless-trash 4y ago
And we liked it !
kbelder 4y ago
I remember in Commodore basic, finding that a period by itself ('.') was parsed as zero, but was actually slightly faster than using zero, and saved a byte every time it was used. In other words, you could write: 10 for i = . to 6.28 step 0.1:next and it would be slightly faster and smaller than 10 for i = 0 to 6.28 step 0.1:next Made for some ugly inner loops, but you gotta do what you gotta do. For that matter, we certainly would have removed some of those extra spaces as well. Bytes mattered and whitespace slowed you down.