Re:Code Golfing in Commodore BASIC
by pgeorgi on Thursday October 05, 2023 @03:48PM
(#37783393)
The keywords are tokenized, the line number is converted to a 16bit integer, leading spaces are stripped (which is why some "formatted" BASIC uses ":" as the first character in a line, like the following), everything else is kept intact.
10 for i = 1 to 10
20 : (arbitrary number of spaces) print "hello"
30 next
The short hand issue is real, too:
1?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?:?
expands into six lines of "1 print:print:....:print" that you can't simply edit because the limit is 80 characters (two lines)