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We will start by having a look at the simplest kinds of expressions: numbers, fractions and text. When submitted to the Pico machine, these expressions -sometimes called literals- are identical to their values. For instance:
REP(123) º 123
REP(4.75) º 4.75
REP('Monday') º Monday
While the meaning of numbers or
fractions is obvious, the notion of text deserves some explanation.
Text is the mechanism used to introduce symbolic -as opposed
to numeric- values; any sequence of keystrokes delimited by
either apostrophes (') or quotes (") is acceptable as text.
Programmers usually have text in their programs to represent symbolic
data or to interact with the outside world using symbols whenever
numbers are not sufficient; in this case the
print
component strips the delimiters from the text value.