The wikipedia page for Microsoft BASIC (which Applesoft Basic is a variant), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microso

The wikipedia page for Microsoft BASIC (which Applesoft Basic is a variant), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BASIC, mentions that integer variables were stored as 2 bytes (signed 16-bit) but all calculations were still done in floating point (plus you needed to store the % character to denote an integer var). So the main benefit was for saving space with an array of integers.