Great work, I will need to check this out. I hope many find it helpful.

I imagine the section on timings will be very useful: not only for picking between similar functions (ipart( vs. int(), but also for settling disputes. Great job on the guide; I can see that alot of work went into this.

I read the whole thing at one sitting, and I must say that the guide is rather comprehensive. I liked how the author explained the mechanics of some of the optimizations. All in all, great job!!

I have read this just now also, and I find it useful also. I have know most of these things through Kenny Hammond (Weregoose), and from experimenting. This guide is very useful and I picked up a few things from it. Great work, and I know this took quite some time and work so I am glad it received the feature it deserved!

an excellent guide, although I didn't really find any new information. good job nonetheless.

Just in time. It may come in handy now...
I am writing a fishing game in BASIC (I only know BASIC).

Is that like which commands are faster, and which ones are better for different things? I'm know most of BASIC, and i'm learning C, but i've never heard of BASIC optimizatoin. Enlightenment would be appreciated.

Well, in this case, optimization mostly means little tricks that save memory, and, on occasion, speed up execution. For example, you can leave off the closing " on strings and do implied multiplication (instead of A*B, do AB, which is faster anyway). One of the tricks I like best is internal subroutines.

Oh I see. Thanks, I was pretty sure that was what it was anyways, but I just wanted to make sure in case I missed an extremely helpful download. Is optimization possible in assembly or c? If it is, is it really that much faster since they are both pretty fast to begin with? Thanks again.

Anything can be optimized, as it is just improving the code by size or speed.

That's the only part of programming on my 83+ that I miss...on the Voyage, you can't do most of that. (Although I much prefer being able to have 8 character long variable names) :)

Is that like which commands are faster, and which ones are better for different things? -->> None are faster than good C equivalents, and none are good for any things. Learn C. :)

I quote: "None are faster than good C equivalents, and none are good for any things. Learn C. :)"

Correction: ASM is the fastest. It will beat C hands down every time (though some compilers *can* generate extremely efficient code, on occasion). Since the Z80 ASM language is relatively easy to learn (compared to that of, say, the Pentium IV (possibly one of the worst chips ever designed in terms of cooling, by the way)), I say: learn ASM :-)

This is nice! Basic is a language that requires mess optimizations like this to make anything good. Until now, not many of them have been formally documented. Good work!

Finally updatement!

This news still doesn't apply to me! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

I thought ticalc.org stopped featuring basic stuff tho, at least thats what someone told me. It might apply only for games tho. Nice tutorial anyway it will help us, even me maybe (I am still learning new stuff >.<)

You're right, the stuff is helpfull for what i've seen. The only problem is that i'm a 68k calc person, but still, the BASIC languages are similiar so this news kind of does apply to me.

r=1-sin(theta)

I read this when it was first uploaded, and was very impressed with how thorough the guide was. Very good for anyone!

This is amazing! I had no idea that you could assign a string to a list! Thanks a lot!

That's what I love about this guide. It's not just another guide that just tells you to remove end parentheses and quotation marks and tells you implied multiplication and all that old stuff. It really demonstrates great optimization techniques with many different data types. That string to list thing really helped me streamline my stat sprite code. You can do something like "augment(L1+A,L2+B->L5 and "augment(L3+C,L4+D->L6, do Plot1(Scatter,L5,L6,dot , and all you have to do next is update A,B,C,D and do any draw command. The guide is full of speed-optimization techniques like this.

yes!

there is still hope hor peopel who want to write efficiently. I am getting tired of people writing bloatware. Thank you for writing this!

I know what you mean; I was looking at the code for a BASIC trisolve program, and I saw (2*A*B*.5) in the middle somewhere.... :(

that's bad.

I hate seeing people put an equation on multiple lines.

:A^2+B^2->C
:C^0.5

:'(

same here, although if you then needed to do "Disp C", or "C+A->X" it would be more efficient on 2 lines.

Actually, I have occasionally done that, if I have to be able to show my work on a timed test.... ;)

Usually that's a bad thing to do, however... if your equations start containing tests and many, many variables - say you want to use one equation to define whether or not a move is illegit in a game of chess - then you may want to separate the equations into multiple lines. Takes more space (though if you write efficiently, not too much of it either), but can save many a bug.

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On a side note, has anyone ever considered storing a world (which is entirely based around an object existing or not existing at any given location) into a list two-dimension list?

The code wouldn't be fast (because large world require lots of work retrieving the data by int( and log( expressions) - but it would be very economical with space.

and that is my problem with computer software. now it seems like all programs are big and slow -- I think microsoft assumes everyone has high speed internet with their 20+MB updates. and software is getting bigger and slower since it's designed for newer computers.

Sorry for this being off-topic, but you should try Red Hat 9, which runs fine on my dual-450 Mhz PII machine, or even the latest version of Knoppix, which despite having the latest kernel and KDE version AND running completely from the CD, which slows everything down anyways, ran slowly but wasn't unusable on a 350 Mhz PII with 196 MB of RAM (at least until I tried installing an icon theme through the control center - then it froze).

well...I can't really switch OS's because I use my laptop for college...and they have to approve the configuration for their network...but I do occationally use INSERT (for UBCD) when I have boot trouble.

The college recommends everyone upgrade to XP Pro and Office 2003 Pro...I don't want to and won't unless absolutely neccesary.

I only just upgraded from XP Home SP1 to SP2...I'll stick with Office XP Pro as long as it works...

>The college recommends everyone upgrade to XP Pro and Office 2003 Pro

Ugh, I hate it when they try to make everyone buy the newest versions of Microsoft's products even if what they have works fine for them.

Basically, that's the configuration they want you to have, and if you encounter any "problems" (i.e. the network is configured for one and only one version of the OS, or something equally <insert favorite derogatory description here>) because you aren't using their "recommended" configuration, they tell you to upgrade before they even try to help you...