Paper tape and 8th bit?

[Bob]

Marking the last byte with the 8th bit saved using a leading string length byte or a trailing zero string delimiter.

It dates back to the days when saveing one byte per keyword in the lookup table was a big memory savings :)

Bob



On Sun, 27 Aug 2006 23:01:56 -0400, Roy J. Tellason wrote:

>On Saturday 26 August 2006 09:23 pm, Dave Dunfield wrote:

>> I think you are right about the '=' as well - funny that they would
>> "tokenize" in this manner - I've written several BASICs over the years -
>> some which operated on pure plain text (no tokenization at all), but most
>> replaced all keywords with a single easily recognizable token - I don't see
>> what advantage this type of tokenization could have done as it saves no
>> space, and you still have to parse the whole word.

>Is there any chance that there are more than one keyword that share the same 
>first few characters?

>This reminds me of wordstar "document" format,  too...

>-- 
>Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
>ablest -- form of life in this section of space,  a critter that can
>be killed but can't be tamed.  --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
>-
>Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James 
>M Dakin