Colon – Statement Separator

The Colon is used to separate statements in the BASIC language though it is not part of the ANSI BASIC, it is part of the more common BASICs (GW-Basic, QBasic, FreeBasic, etc.). Before moving to the translation of colon tokens, like everything else, the action during run-time must be defined.  However, the Colon does not actually do anything at run-time.

Colons don't actually need to be stored as separately in the program, however, for them to be reproduced, something needs to be put into the internal program. The assumption that there will be a colon at the end of each statement except at the end of the line is not sufficient. Consider this statement:

IF A>B THEN PRINT A ELSE PRINT B:A=B:B=0.0

There is no colon after the first print statement. To reproduce colons properly, there will be a colon sub-code set for a command token that has a colon following the statement. For the statements after the ELSE in the example above, the colon sub-code will be set as shown in this translation:

B PrintDbl'Colon' A<ref> B Assign'Colon' B<ref> 0.0 Assign

When a line is reproduced, the Recreator will add a colon after a statement that has the colon sub-code set.