Editing Applesoft BASIC (section)

===Performance===
Wozniak originally referred to his Integer BASIC as "Game BASIC" (having written it so he could implement a [[Breakout clone|''Breakout'' clone]] for his new computer).<ref name="wozniak20140501" /> Few [[action game]]s were written in Applesoft BASIC, in large part because the use of floating-point numbers for all math operations degrades performance.

Applesoft BASIC programs are stored as a [[linked list]] of lines; a <code>GOTO</code> or <code>GOSUB</code> takes [[Computational complexity theory|linear time]]. Some programs have the subroutines at the top to reduce the time for calling them.

Unlike Integer BASIC, Applesoft does not convert literal numbers (like 100) in the source code to binary when a line is entered. Rather, the ASCII string is converted whenever the line is executed. Since variable lookup is often faster than this conversion, it can be faster to store numeric constants used inside loops in variables before the loop is entered.