> All three passes were written largely in Applesoft
Wouldn't this explain it?
But it seems odd that they wouldn't at least save a LUT relating the shortened and expanded variable name.
Wouldn't this explain it?
But it seems odd that they wouldn't at least save a LUT relating the shortened and expanded variable name.
There was no special version for machines with more ram or with a floppy disk.
BASIC implementations based on Microsoft BASIC store tokenized program lines. A keyword takes 1 byte. Comments, variable names, spaces between tokens, etc take up memory on a character-by-character basis.
I didn't use Apple BASIC, but I spent too much time on various flavors of Commodore BASIC which shared this heritage. Changing a variable from "ACCUMULATOR" to "AC" to "A" saved memory and made the program run faster. The problem of not being able to make sense of your own program after was very real.