Date   : Mon, 27 Jan 2014 18:38:17 +0000
From   : jgh@... (J.G.Harston)
Subject: Crunching BASIC code

I'm updating some code that crunches tokenised BASIC code[1], and want 
to check something.

outside quoted strings, is it correct that any spaces immediately 
before a token and immediately after a token can be stripped out, eg:

(spc)(spc)[token](spc)(spc)[token](spc)[token] etc. can be safely 
crunched to:
[token][token][token] etc.

Running through it in my head it certainly seems correct, and my PDP11 
BASIC internals work that way, and I've never had any problems crunching 
code that way.

Similarly, is it correct that spaces before and after an arithmetic 
operator can be stripped, eg

(anything)(spaces)+(spaces)(anything)(spaces)*(spaces)(anything) can be 
safely crunched to:
(anything)+(anything)*(anything)

I'm sure I read an Acorn User or Micro User article on this years ago, 
but cannot find it.

[1]mdfs.net/Software/CommandSrc/BasUtils/Crunching

-- 
J.G.Harston - jgh@...      - mdfs.net