[Coco] About PRINT #1,A,B,C and INPUT #1,A,B,C

[Allen Huffman]

I recently wrote a blog post about the Disk BASIC “WRITE” command and what it did that PRINT does not.

Now I have a question for the audience…

When you PRINT something using commas to separate the items, it TABs to the next 16th position.

PRINT A,B,C

…will print A at the first column, B in the middle o the screen, then C at the first column of the next line.

If you write that to a file, like

PRINT #1,A,B,C

…and open the file and use “LINE INPUT #1,A$:PRINT A$”, you will see the spaces are written out to the file and you get back a string like:

“A …spaces… B …spaces … C”

Yet "INPUT #1,A,B,C” correctly inputs them as three variables. This tells me INPUT must be using those spaces as separators.

BUT, from the keyboard if you do “INPUT A,B,C” and try to type in “1 …spaces… 2 …spaces… 3”, the INPUT routine appears to ignore the spaces and run things together as one number “123” (then prompts ?? For the next two times wanting the other two input variables).

You can see this as follows:

10 INPUT A
20 PRINT A

If you run that and type “1   2   3”, you get back the number “123”.

Since INPUT works on tape and disk the same way, I figure there must be some extra code for handling this special case, and input from the console does not work the same.

Anyone know offhand?

Cheers...

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Allen Huffman - PO Box 7634 - Urbandale IA 50323 - 515-999-0227 (vmail/TXT only)
http://www.subethasoftware.com - https://www.facebook.com/subethasoftware