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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

Current submission title “Print, a one-line BASIC program” is not great. Title from the page:

  10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

Could also be something like “10 PRINT: a book about a one-line Commodore 64 BASIC program” (taken from the first sentence with “is” changed to a colon).

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From the text: “10 PRINT is a book about a one-line Commodore 64 BASIC program, published in November 2012.”

10 PRINT is their official shortened version.

Hey what happened to my submission title? I swear it started with “10 PRINT”. Perhaps a mod/admin changed it, but I don’t have an option to edit it now.

It's automatically removed to reduce the prevalence of listicles on the front page.

I'd recommend always checking submission titles afterwards because the auto-filter often butchers them. You can edit them at least for a few minutes.

TLDR: the program prints a pseudorandom sequence of characters 205 and 206, which on Commodore 64 are graphics characters similar to / and \.

When repeated across multiple lines, it looks like an intricate random maze. But it is actually just a visual representation of whatever PRNG is used on the platform, with the default seed as set by the BASIC interpreter.

https://sta.c64.org/cbm64pet.html

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