Can you expand upon this? All of the research I've done suggest that, not only was it was possible to use integer math in Basic for the Apple II, there are versions of BASIC that only support integers.
[0] https://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/07/03/steve-wozniak-v-step...
I'm not clear on which Apple II ROMs (INTEGER BASIC or Applesoft ROM, or both) he's referring to.
"All operations were done in floating point. On the GE-225 and GE-235, this produced a precision of about 30 bits (roughly ten digits) with a base-2 exponent range of -256 to +255.[49]"
Speaking of, John G. Kemeny's book "Man and the Computer" is a fantastic read, introducing what computers are, how time sharing works, and the thinking behind the design of BASIC.
The last thing they wanted was someone making their very first app and it behaves like:
Please enter your name: John Doe
Please enter how much money you make every day: 80.95
Congratulations John Doe you made $400 this week!This started with $ for strings in Dartmouth BASIC (when it introduced strings; the first edition didn't have them), and then other BASIC implementations gradually added new suffixes. I'm not sure when % and # showed up specifically, but it was already there in Altair BASIC, and thence spread to its descendants, so it was well-established by 1980s.
That said, it probably has something to do with earliest 5-bit and 6-bit text encodings that were very constrained wrt control characters, and often originating from punch cards where fixed-length or length-prefixed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollerith_constant) strings were more common. E.g. DEC SIXBIT didn't even have NUL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-bit_character_code