ESP8266 Community Forum

As many correspondents do, I would like to thank Mike for his sterling efforts in producing ESPbasic thus far. Given the amount of work it must entail, one is hesitant to criticise, but....

One of the recurring problems with the syntax relates to spaces - and whether they should be there or not.

Earlier threads have already pointed out that the space in front of an "=" sign is essential. The space following, however, is not.

Yesterday I was working with file read and write, and it didn't want to play. After some frustration, it seems that write ({filename}, [data$}) does NOT work - however, write({filename}, [data$}) works fine. In other words, in this case you must NOT put a space before the opening parenthesis.

I seem to remember reading about another command recently where it was stated that a space must not be present. All this is very confusing.

I certainly don't have the necessary knowledge to write a compiler, but I have had to implement parsing in many programs in the past. One of the earliest stages was always to remove ALL spaces, except those occurring between quotes - ie strings. That way, whether a space was present or not was irrelevant.

If this is impracticable, then could we at least have some consistency? - either we ALWAYS need a space separating parts of a command or function, or we NEVER need a space in there. This would save me a lot of time!

Phil

I agree about consistency being important, or at any rate helpful. But without looking at the source/documentation, i'm not very clear why you would expect a space to be acceptable there? Is it in other eso functions (shows own ignorance)... most languages function name is directly followed by opening bracket....

most languages function name is directly followed by opening bracket.... - See more at: posting.php?mode=reply&f=42&t=14274#sthash.D8bzPZcc.dpuf

True - but in most languages, x=1 is just as acceptable as x = 1 or even x =1 (both the latter work happily in ESPbasic!)

In fact, in most languages, spaces are irrelevant, and x...=....1 would be quite valid (had to use dots instead of spaces as the forum editor took them all out!!) - that's what I meant about removing all spaces (except those in strings) before parsing the command. In general, spaces should be optional either side of tokens.