Notes for Agents

What these notes are

This section collects short, cross-page guidance for coding agents and IDE assistants writing BBj: rules that span more than one reference page, or that an agent searching page by page would not think to look for. Each note is a single rule with its reason, its edge case, and the evidence behind it -- not a tutorial and not a replacement for the reference pages it links to.

These notes are published as ordinary BASIS Help pages: normal ranking, no boost, no special tool. They carry the source label "Notes for agents" so an agent that finds one through search knows it is curated guidance rather than a reference page, and they cite their evidence the same way every other page does.

How each note is written

Every note follows the same shape: a Rule section stating what to do, a Why section giving the reason, an Edge section naming where the rule stops applying or where a related trap is easy to fall into, an Evidence section linking to the doc pages, the owner verdict or the compiler result the rule rests on, and an Example section whose code always compiles: every example in this section is checked with the BBj compiler (bbjcpl -N), compile only, before publication. No example here is ever run.

Notes in this section

a$ Versus a!: Which String to Use

One Event Style Per Program

Modern BBj for New Code

Hot Keys in Control Text