21 Nov
2005
21 Nov
'05
11:32 a.m.
Subject: Re: BASIC's question mark and PRINT
From: Jim Battle <frustum at pacbell.net>
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 13:03:31 -0600
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>
tim lindner wrote:
The ? was adopted by convention from the fact that early MS basic
(MITS BASIC) the ? was also the same value as the token for print.
Most of the non-compiled 8bit basics were tokenized in memory for
execution and storage and when "LIST"ed were detokenized to list as
Basic we know.
Allison
In BASIC, where did the short cut of '?'
for PRINT originate?
After following a discussion on the CoCo list I thought I'd ask here.
Here are some bounds and data points.
The Dartmouth BASIC specification does not have ? as an abbrevation (circa 1964).
I think all versions of Microsoft BASIC have this shortcut (circa 1975).
Palo Alto Tiny BASIC (li chen wang) didn't use this convention -- instead it
used "P.".
Wang BASIC (circa 1972) didn't use this convention.
From what I can tell, DEC BASIC didn't use this abbreviation.