Infocom on PDP-11

[Paul Koning]

>>>>> "Gooijen" == Gooijen H <Gooijen> writes:

 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