 OPTION allows the BASIC program to meet special criteria.Sometimes BASIC did not have very much user space (since all S/36 programs are limited to 64K) and the area called "code space" which contains the current user program must reside within the user space.Therefore, users could choose OPTION LPREC which causes BASIC to compute with double-precision (long) numerics, or OPTION SPREC which provides more space and single-precision (short) numerics.