- BASIC programs often contain machine code routines but they take up quite a lot of space in BASIC. An interesting way to reduce the amount of space that they take is to store the machine code in REM statements. This is much more compact and also means that we can call the routine directly from the location it is stored in memory rather than having to copy it to a further location. This doesn’t just apply to machine code, we could also do this for storing other data such as a custom character set.