Infocom on PDP-11

Gooijen> No, I can not remember those quotes either. Must have been Gooijen> something else, Paul. For what I remember, BEATHE looked a Gooijen> bit like PASCAL; all the statements ended with a semicolon Gooijen> (;). Admitted, memories are vague after 30 years not using Gooijen> BEATHE :~) but I would certainly remember something as idiot Gooijen> as a quote for every letter of a reserved word of the Gooijen> language. No -- neither in Pascal nor in Algol do statements end in semicolon. Instead, statements are SEPARATED by semicolons. An important difference, which PL/1 and C both got wrong, in different ways. I may have the quoting thing mixed up. It probably was quotes around the keywords, i.e., 'begin' 'int' i; 'if' j=1 'then' ..... The reason for this notation is that traditional Algol does not have any notion of reserved words (the spec has two different typefaces, one for keywords, one for identifiers). The THE system Algol used underlining for keywords (using Flexowriter punch-tape machines where underline was a non-spacing character). So BEATHE was created to preserve that "no reserved words" property. It may have done other things as well, again for the purpose of being maximally compatible with the older language. paul