The following table provides a reference to the significance, meaning and usage of all ASCII characters within the ASB language.
Symbol |
Name |
Description |
' |
apostrophe |
May appear in variable or defined symbol names (after first character). |
- |
minus sign |
Subtraction operator, or unary negative operator. |
! |
exclamation point |
Start of comment; anything to right is ignored by compiler. |
" |
quote |
Used to enclose literal strings. Two quotes in succession ( "" ) translates to a single literal quote. |
# |
pound sign, aka hash or octothorp |
Not equals comparison operator, equivalent to <>. Also used in Explicit Plus Operators and Explicit Comparison Operators. |
$ |
dollar sign |
As a suffix on a variable or function name, indicates string type. Also used in Explicit Plus Operators and Explicit Comparison Operators. |
% |
percent sign |
Not used. |
& |
ampersand |
Line continuation (if last character on line, not counting comments to the right). Also used to indicate "and" in Shortcut Operators. |
() |
open and closed parentheses |
Used to override operator precedence in expressions, to enclose function and procedure argument lists, with array variables to specify the subscripts, and with ordered maps to specify the map key. An empty pair of parentheses on the end of an array or ordered map refers to the array or map as a whole. |
* |
asterisk |
Multiplication operator. |
, |
comma |
Used to separate parameters (XCALLs, function calls) or expressions within a PRINT statement. |
. |
period |
Used as a prefix for some keywords to distinguish them from ordinary variables. Also used to join structure and member names (e.g. cust.name). See Dot Functions, Dot Variables, MLIST Dot-tokens, Special ORDMAP Functions. |
/ |
forward slash |
Division operator. |
: |
colon |
Separates multiple statements on one source line. Also required as last character of a label. |
; |
semi-colon |
Used at the end of a PRINT statement to suppress the output of CR or CRLF line terminator |
@ |
at sign |
Used in overlay declarations. See MAP Statements, Dynamic Overlays. |
[] |
square brackets |
|
\ |
backslash |
Not used. |
^ |
caret |
Exponentiation operator. |
_ |
underscore |
May appear in variable or defined symbol names (after first character). |
` |
grave accent |
Not used. |
{} |
squiggly brackets |
Not used. |
| |
vertical bar or pipe |
Used to indicate "or" Shortcut Operators. |
~ |
tilde |
Not used |
+ |
plus sign |
Numeric addition or string concatenation; see Overloaded Plus Operator, Explicit Plus Operators. |
<> |
angle brackets |
Used individually as greater-than or less-than operators, or together as the not-equal comparison operator. |
= |
equal sign |
Assignment or comparison operator. Also see Shortcut Operators. |
LF |
line feed |
Implicit termination of a statement, usually as the second character in the CRLF pair. |
0-9 |
numeric digits |
May appear in numeric literals or variable or defined symbol names (after first character) |
A-Z, |
alphabetic |
May appear in variable or defined symbol names (case sensitive unless compiled with /CI switch); or in keywords. |
ASCII 1-31 |
control characters |
Used only in literal strings. Note that CR, LF may require encoding using the chr(#) function to avoid syntax issues with compiler. |
ASCII 128-255 |
upper range, (high bit set); accented characters, etc. |
Used only in literal strings. |
