 Internally, these integers were used for line numbers and array indexing, along with a few other tasks, but numbers in the tokenized program were always stored in binary coded decimal (BCD) format.Whenever one of these is encountered, for instance, in the line number in , the tokenized BCD value has to be converted to an integer, an operation that can take as long as 3500 microseconds.Other BASICs avoided this delay by special-casing the conversion of numbers that could only possibly be integers, like the line number following a , switching to special ASCII-to-integer code to improve performance.