This book is awesome for anyone who lived those days.
"the PDS assembler could only handle source files up to a certain size so the more you commented your work the less room you had for the actual game code itself"
"the PDS assembler could only handle source files up to a certain size so the more you commented your work the less room you had for the actual game code itself"
I got into the habit on the Amstrad CPC using the Maxam assembler. 40k was the limit for a source file and some of the stuff I did, like a UK-wide route-planning program (think an enormously primitive version of Autoroute), seriously pushed that.
Having hard tabs, rather than eight spaces, was a major memory saving, while still retaining readable code. Well, as readable as Z80 ever got. Haven't managed to wean myself off them since...
People certainly did do a lot to save space through omitting spaces, using ";" to separate statements instead of new lines etc.
Edit: found a list of the keyword abbreviations. More then I expected/remembered. http://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/BASIC_keyword_abbreviation
You can always use Emacs and YASnippet. Also, Eclipse has a good couple of extremely handy word expansions.
I coveted it an unhealthy amount whilst being stuck with various machine code monitors on the C64 itself, eventually later having the money to upgrade to an assembler. Of course then there was a whole other class of memory problems as most of them hooked BASIC to work so you were quite limited in the length of programs; everyone became very good at manually laying out blocks to memory and disc.