What was the difference between CLOAD and LOAD "C:"?

Question

8-bit Atari Basic had three different formats of storing programs on tape.

• CLOAD/CSAVE
• LOAD "C:"/SAVE "C:"
• ENTER "C:"/LIST "C:"

I understand the specifics of the last one - it behaved as if the contents of the file were typed from keyboard; with some rather simple hack you could save something else than the program in memory; a common one was appending RUN at the end of saved program making it autorun upon loading, as the command was executed as soon as the program was loaded.

I understand LOAD could take other handlers, like D: for disk. I've long and fruitfully used it with T: for tape in Turbo mode provided by cartridge.

But I completely fail to see the point behind CLOAD. Did it provide anything LOAD C: didn't? The two save methods were incompatible, you couldn't perform CLOAD on what you saved with SAVE C: so it wasn't just syntactic sugar. What was its purpose and difference "behind the scenes"? Saving typing "C:" seems pointless?

Answer 1

The three commands correspond to three different storage formats.

• CSAVE drives the cassette recorder directly, and stores tokenized files using short inter-record gaps. This is the fastest mode (both when writing and reading) since it uses a compact representation and doesn't need to wait for the tape.
• SAVE "C:" uses the cassette tape driver, and stores tokenized files in the standard tape format with long inter-record gaps.
• LIST "C:" again uses the cassette tape driver, but it stores text files containing the BASIC listing in ATASCII. This is the slowest mode since it uses a verbose representation.

LIST "C:" provides the best compatibility, since any program which can read text files can load the listing. It also avoids the Rev. B BASIC bug which causes programs to grow by 16 bytes every time they're loaded.