[dep_b]

When I SAVE a program in C64 BASIC and LOAD it again the syntax doesn't change no matter what I do, add spaces or not, use shorthand or not, colons, etcetera. So I get the feeling that my whole program gets saved as a string and then parsed, not tokenized and saved.

Also there is a line limit in C64 BASIC that would overflow if certain shorthand would be expanded and for beginners to see their fully written keywords being transformed to shorthand after loading would be even more confusing.

[pgeorgi]

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)