Atari 800

Introduction to Atari BASIC 65
Secondly, the number of characters entered in response to t~e
INPUT prompt cannot exceed the number of characters that the
string variable specified in
INPUT was dimensioned for. For
example, in the
following,
100 DIM A$(5)
200 INPUT A$
the string variable A$ is only dimensioned for 5 characters in line
100. If the operator attempts to enter a string greater than 5
characters in response
to the INPUT prompt in line 200, Atari
BASIC will ignore any additional characters.
Finally, if string variables are included as one of a number of
variables in an INPUT statement, the value for each string
variable must be
entered on a separate line. In the following
INPUT statement,
500 INPUT A, B, C$, D$
the operator might respond to the INPUT prompt as follows:
100,200, JOHN I
MARY I
The reason for the entry of string data on separate lines is that
Atari BASIC allows a comma to be input as part of a string.
Therefore, the comma cannot be used as a delimiter. You can
test this by
entering the following,
SMITH, JOHN'
for one of the string variables in our preceding example.
It is good progr a mming practice to include a prompt message in
conjunction with an INPUT statement to let the operator know
what data the computer is expecting. This is accomplished by
preceding the INPUT statement with a PRINT statement. If the
PRINT statement is ended with a semicolon, the prompt message
will be di~played on the same line with the INPUT prompt.