Re: Philosophical question regarding statement terminators

| >All statements began with a keyword with the notable exception of
| >"let" which was optional
|
| IMO "Let" was not optional in the very first Basic implementations, it
| acted as one of the legal begin-of-statement tokens....
|
| [That's correct, Dartmouth Basic required the LET. That's one of the
| reasons the compiler was so fast -- the first token always told it
| what kind of statement it was. -John]


Early BASIC's had a very restricted set of variable names: <letter> or
<letter><digit>. If you skipped spaces after the line number and
looked at the next three characters: If they were all letters, they
where (the beginning of) a keyword that uniquely identified the type
of the statement. Otherwise, the statement had to be an assignment
statement.


Support for longer variable names didn't occur for several years.


-- Jerry

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