I'm not exactly sure what's going on with this article and whether it's just the language barrier or something else, but... it doesn't make an awful lot of sense?
'Tricks' like 'not including too many comments' were already well-known from day one of the ZX line (which started around 1980) because, well, you had 1K, 16K or 48K or RAM to work with, so every character counted!
Also, you were painfully aware of the performance of inner/outer loops, because, absolutely, a sub-3 MHz clock speed doesn't leave many other options. Other than to migrate to assembly coding, which was where most serious Sinclair coding took place.
The article is right about one thing, though: the Sinclair BASIC interpreter was a work of minimalist art, as was the hardware. "Sure, let's multiplex the audio-in line with the video sync signal, so we can save a pin on the ULA" is not something that gets a lot of consideration these days...
egypturnash•3h ago
"You can poke new values into the start-of-program pointer to speed up jumps to the end of the program, and speed up loop execution" is pretty tricky. So's "you can poke new values into another pointer to jump to arbitrary statements within a multi-statement line, and here[1] is a 3d maze program that abuses the heck out of this to become a one-liner".
ZeroConcerns•3h ago
'Tricks' like 'not including too many comments' were already well-known from day one of the ZX line (which started around 1980) because, well, you had 1K, 16K or 48K or RAM to work with, so every character counted!
Also, you were painfully aware of the performance of inner/outer loops, because, absolutely, a sub-3 MHz clock speed doesn't leave many other options. Other than to migrate to assembly coding, which was where most serious Sinclair coding took place.
The article is right about one thing, though: the Sinclair BASIC interpreter was a work of minimalist art, as was the hardware. "Sure, let's multiplex the audio-in line with the video sync signal, so we can save a pin on the ULA" is not something that gets a lot of consideration these days...
egypturnash•3h ago
1: https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/21001/ZX-Spectrum/1_Li...