TeaRex

Raffzahn, ad *5: Microsoft BASIC for the 6502 in fact does take this "special" approach - for string data. READing strings from DATA statements into string variables, whether normal or array variables, stores only the length and a pointer to the actual string. The only copy of the actual string content in RAM will be the one in the DATA statement itself. Only numerical data is actually copied, as of course a numerical variable stores a binary (floating point or integer) representation, while the DATA statement stores a string of digits.

I didn't notice that @supercat already says so in the next answer.