Basic Characteristics RAPID

Basic Elements Basic Characteristics RAPID
1.2 Spaces and new-line characters
The RAPID programming language is a free format language, meaning that spaces can
be used anywhere except for in:
- identifiers
- reserved words
- numerical values
- placeholders.
New-line, tab and form-feed characters can be used wherever a space can be used,
except for within comments.
Identifiers, reserved words and numeric values must be separated from one another by
a space, a new-line, tab or form-feed character.
Unnecessary spaces and new-line characters will automatically be deleted from a program
loaded into the program memory. Consequently, programs loaded from diskette
and then stored again might not be identical.
1.3 Numeric values
A numeric value can be expressed as
- an integer, e.g. 3, -100, 3E2
- a decimal number, e.g. 3.5, -0.345, -245E-2
The value must be in the range specified by the ANSI IEEE 754-1985 standard (single
precision) float format.
1.4 Logical values
1.5 String values
A logical value can be expressed as TRUE or FALSE.
A string value is a sequence of characters (ISO 8859-1) and control characters (non-
ISO 8859-1 characters in the numeric code range 0-255). Character codes can be
included, making it possible to include non-printable characters (binary data) in the
string as well.
Example: "This is a string"
"This string ends with the BEL control character \07"
If a backslash (which indicates character code) or double quote character is included,
it must be written twice.
Example: "This string contains a "" character"
"This string contains a \\ character"
5-4 RAPID Reference Manual