Variable substitution faster than in-line integer in Vic-20 basic?

Question

The following two (functionally equivalent) programs are taken from an old issue of Compute's Gazette. The primary difference is that program 1 puts the target base memory locations (7680 and 38400) in-line, whereas program 2 assigns them to a variable first.

Program 1 runs about 50% slower than program 2. Why? I would think that the extra variable retrieval would add time, not subtract it!

10 PRINT"[CLR]":A=0:TI$="000000"
20 POKE 7680+A,81:POKE 38400+A,6:IF A=505 THEN GOTO 40
30 A=A+1:GOTO 20
40 PRINT TI/60:END

Program 1

10 PRINT "[CLR]":A=0:B=7600:C=38400:TI$="000000"
20 POKE B+A,81:POKE C+A,6:IF A=505 THEN GOTO 40
30 A=A+1:GOTO 20
40 PRINT TI/60:END

Program 2

Answer 1

It's from page 76 of this issue: http://www.scribd.com/doc/33728028/Compute-Gazette-Issue-01-1983-Jul

I used to love this magazine. It actually says a 30% improvement. Look at what's happening in program 2 and it becomes clear, because you are looping a lot using variables the program is doing all the memory allocation upfront to calculate memory addresses. When you do the slower approach each iteration has to allocate memory for the highlighted below as part of calculating out the memory address:

POKE 7680+A,81:POKE 38400+A

This is just the nature of the BASIC Interpreter on the VIC.

Answer 2

The reason is that BASIC is fully interpreted here, so the strings "7680" and "38400" need to be converted to binary integers EVERY TIME line 20 is reached (506 times in this program). In program 2, they're converted once and stored in B. So as long as the search-for-and-fetch of B is faster than convert-string-to-binary, program 2 will be faster.

If you were to use a BASIC compiler (not sure if one exists for VIC-20, but it would be a cool retro-programming project), then the programs would likely be the same speed, or perhaps 1 might be slightly faster, depending on what optimizations the compiler did.

Answer 3

Accessing the first defined variable will be fast; the second will be a little slower, etc. Parsing multi-digit constants requires the compiler to perform repeated multiplication by ten. I don't know what the exact tradeoffs are between variables and constants, but short variable names use less space than multi-digit constants. Incidentally, the constant zero may be parsed more quickly if written as a single decimal point (with no digits) than written as a digit zero.