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Re: Syntactical Meanderings
Posted By: Fobulis, on host 152.163.201.188
Date: Friday, April 14, 2000, at 15:31:13
In Reply To: Re: Syntactical Meanderings posted by Sam on Thursday, April 13, 2000, at 10:25:28:

> So that good old Apple II's infamous "syntax error" error message was telling you that whatever you just typed in did not conform to the syntactic rules of the programming language you were using at the time. Specifically, BASIC -- I became intimately familiar with that error message myself. Usually a "syntax error" was the result of a typo, or forgetting to put in a particular piece of required punctuation. Syntax errors are common and annoying when you're just getting into programming, but they quickly become the easiest of the various possible errors to fix, because an error in syntax has nothing to do with what you're trying to get the computer to do -- it just means you told it in a way it couldn't understand. If, on the other hand, you fix the syntax error, and then the program does something completely different from what you were hoping it would do, the debugging process is more involved, because you have to figure out where the *semantics* of your programming code weren't what you thought they were.
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So if you entered in "syntax error", you'd get "syntax error" as output? ;-)

-Fob"way too easily amused"ulis