* * * * *

        A classic blunder, like getting involved in a land war in Asia

The first time [1] I included some BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic
Instruction Code) code, I typed in the sample directly from a magazine (like
we used to do back in the 1980s). The second (and most recent) time I
included BASIC code [2], it was extracted from a disk image downloaded from
the Intarwebs (using code I wrote) and then decoded into ASCII (American
Standard Code for Information Interchange), using code I wrote, based off a
text file I also found on the Intarwebs. I didn't notice when I posted the
code because it was a wall of text 32 characters wide (the width of the text
screen on a Color Computer). It was only months later when I finally noticed
all the THENNOTs littering the code.

There was nothing wrong with the actual file, but I did locate the bug in my
code:

-----[ C ]-----
char const *const c_tokens[] =
{
 "FOR",
 "GO",
 /* ... */
 "SUB",
 "THEN"
 "NOT",
 "STEP",
 "OFF",
 /* ... */
 "DSKO$",
 "DOS"
};
-----[ END OF LINE ]-----

If you look close, you'll see there's a missing comma after the THEN token,
and in C, two literal strings separated by whitespace are concatenated into a
single string. Thus, all the THENNOTs I was seeing. And a bunch of incorrect
code because most of the BASIC keywords were then off-by-one (a classic
mistake of C programming).

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2008/01/04.1
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2023/05/10.1

Email author at [email protected]

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