BASIC's question mark and PRINT

Allison wrote: Allison, that seems unlikely. Later versions of microsoft basic certainly didn't use any value lower than 0x80 for tokens. Even if you could find a few characters in the "live" portion of the ascii table that didn't lead to ambiguous parsing, I can't think of a good reason why they'd do it -- there was enough room at 0x80 and above, and not enough unused values below 0x80, so why have two lookup tables when one would do? It would seem much easier to have special case where '?' got mapped to the token for PRINT. OK, trying to be less speculative, I looked at the binary for ALTAIR BASIC VERSION 3.2 [EIGHT-K VERSION] that is included with Rich Cini's Altair emulator. At the end is the list of the statement keywords. In memory each keyword abuts the next, and the boundary between keywords is marked by setting the msb of the byte. Here is the table in order: END FOR NEXT DATA INPUT DIM READ LET GOTO RUN IF RESTORE GOSUB RETURN REM STOP OUT ON NULL WAIT DEF POKE PRINT CONT LIST CLEAR CLOAD CSAVE NEW TAB( Since there no room for storing a token value after each item (I know it is possible that that mapping is held elsewhere, but it seems unlikely), these keywords very likely have consecutive token values. Elsewhere in the binary, near the beginning, is a similar table for the functions (FN, SPC, NOT, AND, OR, VAL, CHR, LEFT, RIGHT, MID, FRE, SIN, COS, TAN, PEEK, etc, but also including THEN, STEP).