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I read thru the programming manuals as well as the discussion in this question , so at least I understand what IF(X - 0Y) ... does. But what I can't find is any discussion of this conversion from character to numeric operation in the FOCAL manuals (1969 and 1972) I found online. Was it just assumed that programmers of that era knew what a PDP-X OS would do with that syntax?

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The conversion is nicely explained in DEC's 1970 FOCAL Programming Manual in section 2.12, page 2-12:

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The following page brings some helpful examples:

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There's always a helpful manual :))

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  • 12
    What a horrible 8141, I mean 0HACK.
    – dave
    Commented Jun 29 at 22:01
  • 2
    Thanks -- added that manual to my collection
    – Carl Witthoft
    Commented Jun 29 at 23:49
  • And today we call this "comparing strings by hash values", with a really simple hash (and actually not bothering with the strings themselves).
    – dirkt
    Commented Jun 30 at 6:46
  • And with 'E' being the most commonly used letter in English, this led to a lot of overflows when trying to process "text" in FOCAL! For example, what is the numerical value of "0OVERFLOW"?
    – Crash Gordon
    Commented 2 days ago
  • @CrashGordon - perhaps a good reason to invent L33T speak?
    – Jon Custer
    Commented yesterday

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