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by BayesianDice 994 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.