Directly related to the planet name generation routine, if you look closely - the same tokens are used there (although that's not all of it). Part of this legacy carries over to the sequels, even the recently-released Elite: Dangerous, although the "old worlds" are patched in by hand along with a bunch of discovered stars.
A small side-effect, however: Bell & Braben had to try several galaxy seeds in Elite before they happened upon one that didn't generate the planet Arse!
Lots of things of the era did things like this, of course. 8-bit BASICs would often tokenise on input to reduce memory consumption and the amount of lexing needed during the interpreting.
Even as late as the PlayStation, similar things were still very common practice: take a look at the English translations of Final Fantasy 7 through 9, or Chrono Cross, for excellent examples of the type of thing, which (if I recall correctly? It's been a few years!) don't use ASCII (but map to offsets in the tilesets), use control characters to handle colours and the like, sometimes have digraphs and in the case of Chrono Cross, due to a lack of disc space (caused by English text being bigger than Japanese text of an equivalent meaning), the localisation team got highly creative and made an accent engine for the 44 or so different characters so that quite a lot of the lines could be reused and changed on-the-fly (as the 'developer ending' documents).
A small side-effect, however: Bell & Braben had to try several galaxy seeds in Elite before they happened upon one that didn't generate the planet Arse!
Lots of things of the era did things like this, of course. 8-bit BASICs would often tokenise on input to reduce memory consumption and the amount of lexing needed during the interpreting.
Even as late as the PlayStation, similar things were still very common practice: take a look at the English translations of Final Fantasy 7 through 9, or Chrono Cross, for excellent examples of the type of thing, which (if I recall correctly? It's been a few years!) don't use ASCII (but map to offsets in the tilesets), use control characters to handle colours and the like, sometimes have digraphs and in the case of Chrono Cross, due to a lack of disc space (caused by English text being bigger than Japanese text of an equivalent meaning), the localisation team got highly creative and made an accent engine for the 44 or so different characters so that quite a lot of the lines could be reused and changed on-the-fly (as the 'developer ending' documents).