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Re:Code Golfing in Commodore BASIC by vidarh on Monday October 02, 2023 @07:33AM (#37736842)
It wasn't that it didn't continue, but that this was unique to a branch of languages that largely were sidelined.

And the tokenization didn't prevent you from style differences anyway - as the article points out it e.g. keeps spaces etc. It only tokenized a few things, like keywords and line numbers.

Re:Code Golfing in Commodore BASIC by BayesianDice on Monday October 02, 2023 @09:16AM (#37737661)
I think I read about a tool for the Acorn BBC micros which you could apply to your program to remove unnecessary spaces etc. in the tokenised form and shave off a few bytes.

This had the side-effect that you could still display and (presumably with a bit more mental effort, read) the program listing fine, but re-entering a line as shown in that listing would fail because the computer depended on the spaces to do the parsing, even if they were redundant after the tokenisation happened.

Re:Code Golfing in Commodore BASIC by cvcount on Monday October 02, 2023 @10:39AM (#37738737)
On the ZX Spectrum, numeric values were saved as both text, and in a five-byte floating point format. So making lines shorter often involved using keywords to avoid that: NOT PI, SGN PI, VAL "2" etc.
Re:Code Golfing in Commodore BASIC by kbelder on Monday October 02, 2023 @12:43PM (#37740748)
Atari BASIC tokenized source a bit more thoroughly... eliminated spaces, parsed constants into their floating point representation, etc. It did enforce formatting to a degree.

I was always surprised that it did all that, but wasn't any faster than Commodore BASIC.