What does REM stand for in BASIC?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1297481

  •  18-09-2019
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Question

Here's a blast from the past: what does "REM", the comment marker, stand for in BASIC? What's the origin of this non-obvious term?

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Solution

I believe it stands for "Remark", that is, a comment. From the MSDN site:

Used to include explanatory remarks in the source code of a program.

OTHER TIPS

It was REMark, back in the late Steam Age (ca. 1971 or so), when I first encountered BASIC.

Most approachable book I've ever found on the language was "My Computer Likes Me (When I Speak In BASIC)", or something like that.

For extra credit and mondo greybeard rep points: BASIC is an acronym (maybe a backronym, but whatever), for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

I hated BASIC when I first ran into it, because I learned FORTRAN IV first, and BASIC seemed incredibly primitive. It was a long time before I got comfortable with the idea that BASIC was actually a lot easier to use for the kind of casual numbercrunching it was designed to do.

It's an abbreviation for "remark", valid only at the beginning of the line (unlike vb.net), after the line number (if any).

I always thought of it as "reminder", myself, but Chris Bunch is probably right - "remark" seems more likely.

In some dialects of QBasic the following is true:

REM $STATIC
or
' $STATIC

REM $DYNAMIC
or
' $DYNAMIC

$DYNAMIC sets aside storage for arrays while the program is running.
$STATIC sets aside storage for arrays during compilation.

REM $INCLUDE: 'filespec'
      or
' $INCLUDE: 'filespec'

 filespec    The name of a BASIC program file, which can include a
             path. Use single quotation marks around filespec.
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