In article ,
Syd Rumpo wrote:
On 03/02/2015 21:58, Adam Funk wrote:

snip

OTOH, "Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom
about the tenth century A. D., and lasted until about 1957, when
FORTRAN abandoned the practice."

Bringing to mind the ancient example from BASIC...

FORK = 10 TOMATOES

What's interesting about that (to someone who wrote a BASIC interpreter
anyway!) is that in ye olde days the BASIC code was stored as the text
you type in, then parsed and intrepreted at RUN time.

So you have fun like that, and:

REMARKABLE PROGRAM

... STEPTOE

etc.

BASICs got faster when they started to do more syntax checking on entry
and tokenisation - which saved memory on the newer microprocessors and
reduced the run-time overhead. Then the LIST command is essentially a
de-tokenizer and as such the output then tends to be at the whim of the
programmer who wrote the interpreter.

But not all BASICs do this - some tokenize and preserve spaces - leading
to horrible program listings as the (BASIC) programmer tries to make
their program go faster by eliminating spaces, using short variable
names and so on. I'm sure that's one of the things that contributed to
the current dislike of BASIC.

Gordon