Important Notice

The pages on this site contain documentation for very old MS-DOS software, purely for historical purposes. If you're looking for up-to-date documentation, particularly for programming, you should not rely on the information found here, as it will be woefully out of date.

  ◄Syntax Notation►   ◄Contents►   ◄Index►
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How to Read On-line Help Syntax Notation
 
KEYWORDS               Items in capital letters indicate BASIC keywords.
                       Keywords are a required part of the statement syntax,
                       unless they are enclosed in brackets. You must spell
                       keywords correctly.
placeholders           Items in lowercase are placeholders for information
                       you must supply in the statement, such as a filename.
[optional item]        Items inside square brackets do not need to be used
                       in the statement.
{choice1 | choice2}    Braces and a vertical bar indicate a choice between
                       two or more items.  You must use one of the items in
                       the statement unless the braces are enclosed in
                       square brackets.
 
IMPORTANT:  The uppercase and lowercase syntax notation conventions are
            used to help you read the syntax rules for a statement, and
            are NOT capitalization rules you must type in.
 
One other notation convention that is used is the three-dot ellipsis:
 
   item, item, ...      Means more of the preceding items can be used
                        in a single-line statement.
   beginning KEYWORD
   .                    used to describe multi-line statements
   .                    (or block-structured statements).  Means
   .                    that other statements can be used between
   ending KEYWORD       the beginning and the end of the block.
 
 
Here is an example of using the PRINT command syntax:
 
  Syntax:
    PRINT [expressionlist][{,|;}]
 
  Given the syntax rule above, these are all syntactically correct
  PRINT statements:
    PRINT
    PRINT x
    PRINT x, y + 1
    PRINT x,
    PRINT x;
    PRINT x + y + z, a - 1, b / 2;
 
  And there are many, many more.