Remarks: One-Liners

One-liners such as 10Print are curt, minimal BASIC programs written to illustrate, imitate, or express an idea. Due to their brevity, they must often exploit resources which exist in the underlying platform. For example, 10Print relies on graphical images called PETSCII contained in the ROMs of the Commodore computers. The single line of code itself contains no data pertaining to the curvature or pixels comprising the / and \ images, it merely uses the numbers 205.5 and .5 to refer to characters number 205 and 206. Therefore 10Print relies on the existence block graphics sets.

Block graphics sets - including the non-typographic / and \ symbols used in 10Print - have collectively produced a vocabulary capable of representing emotions, stick-figures, balance sheets, graphical window systems. In one-liners, sometimes symbols are interpreted as the subject of the story. For example, in this variation on 10Print, one of the slanted symbols represents an icicle. The impression of movement and space-filling are inherent features of the platform. Specifically, the slow, ruthless instantiation of symbolic icicles mimics the dynamics of a mounting storm. Although the one-line simulation represents the accumulating energy of a storm well, it will never, like a real storm, die out and warm up. After completely filling the screen, the action ceases, so the one-liner can only tell one part of a story.

In addition to relying upon the existence of the graphics in operating system, this one-liner also relies on the default colors of the BASIC environemnt to be light blue on dark blue: