Typography and BASIC
From Maze
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| − | == The Semicolon == | + | == The Semicolon in BASIC == |
One of the most easily overlooked elements of the 10 Print program is the semicolon. The semi-colon tells BASIC to display the / and \ characters serially, across the screen, column by column. When the 40th column is reached, the characters continue at the beginning of the next line, as with a typewriter carriage return. Were the semicolon to be removed (as happens with one example in the [[10_Print_Variorum|variorum]]), the program will display each / or \ on a separate line, thereby rendering a vertical semi-continuous zigzag. In other words, there's exactly one character textually that means the difference visually between a column and a maze. The semicolon resists enjambment. | One of the most easily overlooked elements of the 10 Print program is the semicolon. The semi-colon tells BASIC to display the / and \ characters serially, across the screen, column by column. When the 40th column is reached, the characters continue at the beginning of the next line, as with a typewriter carriage return. Were the semicolon to be removed (as happens with one example in the [[10_Print_Variorum|variorum]]), the program will display each / or \ on a separate line, thereby rendering a vertical semi-continuous zigzag. In other words, there's exactly one character textually that means the difference visually between a column and a maze. The semicolon resists enjambment. | ||
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It's clear, then, that both the comma and semicolon as they are used in BASIC in the seventies and eighties are legacies of print[er] culture and have little to do with formatting on the screen. They were also accommodations for printing NUMBERS, not letters, and certainly not graphical characters. | It's clear, then, that both the comma and semicolon as they are used in BASIC in the seventies and eighties are legacies of print[er] culture and have little to do with formatting on the screen. They were also accommodations for printing NUMBERS, not letters, and certainly not graphical characters. | ||
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| + | == The Semicolon and the Commodore 64 == | ||
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| + | The 1981 Commodore Basic manual reveals that the early version of BASIC's notion of dividing each teletype line into "print zones" was translated to the Commodore. | ||
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| + | As the Commodore manual explains: | ||
| + | <blockquote>The position of each printed item is determined by the punctuation used to separate the items in the list. BASIC divides the line into print zones of 10 spaces each. In the list of expressions, a comma causes the next value to be printed at the beginning of the next zone. A semicolon causes the next value to be printed immediately after the last value.</blockquote> | ||
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| + | This means, of course, that using a comma instead of a semicolon---changing just a single character in 10 Print---produces a radically different design, more hieroglyphic than labyrinth: | ||
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| + | Someone in the eighties might have easily discovered this variation on his/her own, monkeying around with the program. But without knowing about the original BASIC's reliance upon teletype printers for output (an output, furthermore, that was expected to be columns of numbers), the reason for the variation between comma and semicolon would be obscure, if not seemingly utterly arbitrary. | ||
