BASIC's question mark and PRINT

[Gordon JC Pearce]

Jim Battle 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?

Aha - didn't the last letter of each keyword have bit 7 set?

That would mean that it would be 63+128 = 191

Just a thought.

Gordon.