It's not clear to me what the difference is between INT and CINT, but it may be subtle.

In TRS-80 Level 2 BASIC it's called FIX, for an additional byte of savings.

I have done it for Scot and Kevin and Charlie here in the past, but the optimizations I found for them were very "local", and I think for me to be able to tackle a job worthy of an "honorable mention" would require a level of attention that I can't provide at the moment, especially since I don't do ...

Please forgive me for not digging into this myself, but what style of floats are you using? MS, IEEE, Woz, BCD, custom? I want to design something to fill the void between the tiny BASICs and the 8K BASICs, and I think a custom 24-bit float should do the trick, along with HP-style strings and a few ...

Unless they are the same block of code. Elegant interfaces and hardware abstraction layers are nifty, but not necessarily a best fit for everyone.

Unless you're a brutal byte-miser, anything you can do to speed up the inner-most loop is going to pay the best dividends.

Wasn't scanning 65xx machine code "against the grain" a bit of a crapshoot anyway, even without the M and X bits?

Hypothetically 256, because $FF wraps to $00, right?

Yes. "Random" and "Unique" have a lot of similarities, but "Unique" or even "Consecutive" could be the slightly better choice for this use case, IMHO.

If you have an uptime counter with sufficient resolution, can't you just make that part of the temporary file name and not even worry about generating pseudo-random characters?

Thank you, Arlet! At a net cost of ten bytes, VTLC02 now has a pseudo-random number generator that never gets stuck in a short cycle, and overall performance is slightly improved. I can't say that I fully understand it, but it acts like a pre-shuffled deck of 65536 unique cards ... the VTL program ...

In VTL-2, this might be done like so, with its analog for MS BASIC's "INKEY$" (or perhaps more accurately, "GET"): 10 ?="OK? (Y/N)";
20 A=$) snag and echo a keypress
30 #=A=89*50) ascii "Y"
35 #=A=78*60) ascii "N"
40 $=8) erase invalid entry
45 #=20) and try again
50 ?="ES") auto-complete the ...

I did think that the multiplication that you need to use in VTL-2 for every loop might have slowed it down, but it didn't appear to. (It's also an unsigned multiply). I spent a few precious code bytes to make 0*X and 1*X faster in VTL02C, knowing that it would have a favorable cost-to-benefit ratio ...

It's verging on the esoteric, but still very usable. Usable today for anything other than an historical curiosity? Mabe, maybe not. Same for TinyBasic I guess. But who knows.
Bravo, Gordon! The original VTL-2 was designed for the Altair 680b, which was the red-headed foster brother of the much ...