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It took me some time to get why this is faster than simply poking in a for-next loop - nice hack (for those who don't know I can recommend one of Ben Eater's latest BASIC hacking videos)!

But why add only 1 character each time, why not add the string to itself? That would grow it exponentially and would require much fewer steps. Or is string concatenation much slower than character concatenation?

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Too much growth can be a problem too, according to this other article strings are at most 255 bytes long:

https://retro64.altervista.org/blog/garbage-collection-commo...

Which would limit the loop to 1 + 2 + 4 ... 128 = 255. You could start off with this, but making it work and filling exactly 8000 might be too complicated.

The 1..125 loop stores 8000 bytes of string and they need to clear 8000 bytes.

There may be a fast path for adding one character, but in any case bytes of program are a valuable resource with only 64k ram so having a second loop from nearest power of two to 8000 would be a waste of bytes.

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