Wow. I totally forgot that Commodore BASIC ignores spaces in variable names. I do remember that it ignores anything after the first two letters though. That said, there’s a bit more going on here than meets the eye.
PRINT HELLO WORLD
is actually parsed asPRINT
HELLOW
OR
LD
, that is: grab the values of the variablesHELLOW
(which is actually justHE
) andLD
, bitwiseOR
them together and then print.Since it’s very likely both
HE
andLD
were undefined, they were quietly created then initialised to 0 before their bitwise-OR was calculated for the0
that appeared.Back in the day, people generally didn’t put many spaces in their Commodore BASIC programs because those spaces each took up a byte of valuable memory. That PET2001, if unexpanded, only has 8KB in it.
</old man rant>
if you flip it over it spells 80085
Everyone’s heard of the “Hello world” being people’s first program, but just as popular among teenaged boys is their second, more advanced program: Boobs! :)