22 Mar
2007
22 Mar
'07
7:29 p.m.
On 22 Mar 2007 at 20:34, Roger Holmes wrote:
If a FORMAT statement is not referenced by a READ or
WRITE statement,
does it matter if it is compiled incorrectly?
Hmm, that's an interesting question. Almost sounds like a koan.
I presume that's why some Basics needed LET before
an assignment.
BASIC has reserved words. That makes it too easy to figure out what
a statement is, particularly if you demand a LET for assignment
statements and restrict variables to 2 characters.
When you extend BASIC with multicharacter variables and optional LET,
you have to admit some sort of lexical control, either by saying that
an identifier can't begin with a reserved word, demanding white space
or some other such mechanism. Otherwise, something like
400 LETJ=3
becomes ambiguous.
Cheers,
Chuck