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 ever

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.