Re: Philosophical question regarding statement terminators

Jerry Leichter <jerrold.leichter@smarts.com>
14 Nov 2000 13:12:28 -0500

          From comp.compilers

Related articles
Philosophical question regarding statement terminators steve@brazzell.com (Steve Brazzell) (2000-11-07)
Re: Philosophical question regarding statement terminators tmoog@polhode.com (Tom Moog) (2000-11-09)
Re: Philosophical question regarding statement terminators cfc@world.std.com (Chris F Clark) (2000-11-09)
Re: Philosophical question regarding statement terminators jthorn@galileo.thp.univie.ac.at (2000-11-09)
Re: Philosophical question regarding statement terminators vbdis@aol.com (2000-11-11)
Re: Philosophical question regarding statement terminators wclodius@aol.com (2000-11-14)
Re: Philosophical question regarding statement terminators cfc@world.std.com (Chris F Clark) (2000-11-14)
Re: Philosophical question regarding statement terminators jerrold.leichter@smarts.com (Jerry Leichter) (2000-11-14)
Re: Philosophical question regarding statement terminators cfc@world.std.com (Chris F Clark) (2000-11-15)
Re: Philosophical question regarding statement terminators vbdis@aol.com (2000-11-17)
Re: Philosophical question regarding statement terminators vbdis@aol.com (2000-11-19)
Re: Philosophical question regarding statement terminators adrian@sartre.cs.rhbnc.ac.uk (A Johnstone) (2000-11-21)
Re: Philosophical question regarding statement terminators cfc@world.std.com (Chris F Clark) (2000-11-25)
| List of all articles for this month |

From: Jerry Leichter <jerrold.leichter@smarts.com>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 14 Nov 2000 13:12:28 -0500
Organization: System Management ARTS
References: 00-11-069 00-11-090
Keywords: syntax, design
Posted-Date: 14 Nov 2000 13:12:28 EST

| >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


Post a followup to this message

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.