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by stevekemp 1306 days ago
When I started coding I'd type

   10 FOR F = 1 TO 10 
   20   PRINT F, F*F
   30 NEXT F
Because "FOR" and "F" shared the same key, on my ZX Spectrum keyboard.
1 comments

And for those that don't know - entering Basic code on the Spectrum (well the original one at least) was ALL single/shifted key shortcuts for keywords rather than typing them out.

eg https://www.old-computers.com/museum/photos/sinclair_zx-spec...

The low cost and quirky masochism was mainly why we loved it.

Same thing for the ZX-80 and ZX-81. If you were careful with your text prompts, you could save several bytes by injecting a keyword instead of typing it out, but anything that was a "start of line only" could be tricky injecting into a string.