BASIC environment ending with "run complete", and slashed 'O' characters?

Paul Koning paulkoning at comcast.net
Tue Apr 26 19:14:41 CDT 2022



> On Apr 26, 2022, at 7:55 PM, Jules Richardson <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Paul,
> 
> Thanks for that! I'd mentioned this over on Facebook, where I'd also been able to post a photo of the transcript, and someone there pointed out that the BASIC listing uses single quotes around strings (what I'd expect to be ASCII 27h) rather than the double quotes that BASIC typically uses (expected ASCII 22h).

I don't know CDC BASIC at all, and the only BASIC dialect I know at all well is BASIC-PLUS (from DEC).  There, strings may be enclosed in either kind of quotes so long as they match.  And as far as I remember that's not a BASIC-PLUS extension.

> Is that at all "meaningful" in any way? Did CDC BASIC use (or at least allow) single quotes instead of double? Or was the teletype maybe configured to print a single quote when encountering ASCII 22h, normally a double? Obviously I don't know why anyone would actually want that behavior.

An obvious reason to use one vs. the other is to enclose the other kind of quote, exactly as Python does it.  It may be that on the CDC system in question there was some reason for picking one over the other, though I don't know what that might be; the CDC internal standard character set has both quotes in it, though as alternate "newer" glyphs replacing not-equal and uparrow from the original form of the "display code" set.

	paul



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