It's all a little bit messy. The original idea (remember symbols could be long,
and processors were slow) was that the interpreter could make a quick decision
based just on the first character of a symbol. TRL gives
3D
as an example of a valid constant symbol. Topical, if you're into TVs! :-)
The idea was that symbols are classified into constant or non-constant simply
from their 'appearance', with no need to analyse them and check whether they are
valid numbers, etc. For example:
127.0.0.1
is treated as a constant, and would not need any further processing or checking
unless you tried to do arithmetic on it. This is good on the whole -- handling
IP addresses, for example. But it does allow things like 3a.5d -- which may or
may not be useful [3 across + 5 down?].
Mike
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