Most dialects of BASIC use the “#” character to introduce a file reference. Early in the development of JBasic, I aspired to have as few required non-obvious punctuation marks as possible since I wanted the program to be spelled out clearly for students.
JBasic has supported the use of the keyword FILE to introduce a file identifier, and the “#” sharp sign to introduce an integer numeric file reference. However, so many programs you might want to port to JBasic all assume the “#” character.
So I’ve changed the language so that the FILE keyword and the “#” character really are syntactically identical.
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Most dialects of BASIC use the “#” character to introduce a file reference. Early in the development of JBasic, I aspired to have as few required non-obvious punctuation marks as possible since I wanted the program to be spelled out clearly for students.
JBasic has supported the use of the keyword FILE to introduce a file identifier, and the “#” sharp sign to introduce an integer numeric file reference. However, so many programs you might want to port to JBasic all assume the “#” character.
So I’ve changed the language so that the FILE keyword and the “#” character really are syntactically identical.