> On Apr 26, 2022, at 7:55 PM, Jules Richardson <jules.richardso...@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
