[flohofwoe]

I guess that's a philosophical question.

In most home computer BASIC interpreters, the source code (including line numbers) never exists as text in memory or on tape/disk, only as binary tokens. The only place where the original input text exists is a small line buffer which gets translated into binary token form when pressing Enter/Return.

The LIST command translates the token form back into human readable text.

And if you use 'AUTO' you also never type any line numbers... so are they actually part of the source code? Is there even 'source code' when the original source is never stored as text anywhere? Is the 'source code size' then the size of the original text data (that actually never exists a whole), or the size of binary token representation in memory and on tape/disk? :)

[kragen]

sure, you might want to count the tokenized representation instead of the printed representation, so maybe the real number is something smaller than 432, but it contains the line numbers too. you definitely don't want to count the 432 bytes of printed representation and leave out the 16 bytes of line numbers because the program won't run without them

[wang_li]

How do you speculate GOTO works if the tokenized program doesn’t have line numbers? Or if I write

     5 REM MY COOL PROGRAM
    10 PRINT “HELLO” 
    20 GOTO 10

Then later I write

    10 PRINT “DIE BART DIE”

How does it know to replace the right line?

[flohofwoe]

The line number is stored in the program, just not as text. It's preparsed into a (usually 16-bit) integer as part of the 'tokenization' of the input line buffer.

[kragen]

i don't think that flohofwoe was claiming the line numbers weren't stored, just that the textual representation with line numbers maybe isn't the correct measure