variable names in Waterloo BASIC

I have an assignment at work to convert some programs that are on a timeshare server to a more usable format. These programs are around 30 years old and were updated once about 20-25 years ago. They were converted to Waterloo BASIC.

I'm going over the files right now to get a feel for them until I can get over to the University to order the primer from the system's archive library.

I see variable names that end in $ and others that do not. For example:

Code:

---

03200 DIM A$(10),B$(10),W(10),H(10),D(10),S(10),F(10),E(10),Q(10),M(10)
03300 DIM R(10),A(10),P(10),K(10),Y(10),FT(2),PT(2),MT(2),YT(2),V(10)

---

You'll notice there is a A$ and an A variable.

Anyone know what the difference is and what the $ means?

I'm not that familiar with basic and I haven't seen $ used like that in the VBA I've written.

In many Basic dialects, the symbolic postfix is a type annotation. In other Basic dialects, there are other ways to do this. The $ postfix is for strings.
E.g. in VB, this:
Dim A as String
and this:
Dim A$
are equivalent, except that the second variable is called "A$". They're both of type String, whereas suffix-less variables are of no type - they're variants. Although I'm not sure about that in other dialects, so for all I know, in Waterloo suffix-less variables could be integers.

Ok thanks a bunch.

Reading through the code I had noticed that all of the $ postfixed variables were being used as strings but I wasn't sure if that was a syntax thing or a convention thing.

If its the same as Blitz Basic then a hash (#) postfix means the variables a float.By default all values are integers; a % postfix can be used to explicitly declare this but is not necessary. You only need to use a postfix when you first declare a new variable, but I find its good to use them all the time to make code clearer.

Do either of you know what the difference between ! and REM is? From the code it looks like both are comments and ! can be used as an equivalent to //.