Important Notice

The pages on this site contain documentation for very old MS-DOS software, purely for historical purposes. If you're looking for up-to-date documentation, particularly for programming, you should not rely on the information found here, as it will be woefully out of date.

  ◄Programming Tasks►   ◄Device I/O►   ◄Contents►   ◄Index►
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Statements and Functions Used for Device I/O
 
                            Statement or
Task                        Function         Action
 
Printing text (ASCII        PRINT            Outputs text to the screen
characters) on the
screen
 
                            PRINT USING      Outputs formatted text to
                                             the screen
 
Changing the width          WIDTH            Changes the width of the
of the output line                           screen to either 40 columns
                                             or 80 columns; and, on
                                             computers with an EGA or VGA,
                                             controls the number of lines
                                             on the screen (25 or 43)
 
                            WIDTH "SCRN:"    Assigns a maximum length to
                                             lines output to the screen
                                             when used before an OPEN
                                             "SCRN:" statement
 
Getting input from          INKEY$           Reads a character from the
the keyboard                                 keyboard
 
                            INPUT$           Reads a specified number of
                                             characters from the keyboard
                                             and stores them in a single
                                             string variable
 
                            INPUT            Reads input from the keyboard
                                             and stores it in a list of
                                             variables
 
                            LINE INPUT       Reads a line of input from
                                             the keyboard and stores it
                                             in a single string variable
 
Positioning the cursor      LOCATE           Moves the cursor to a given
on the screen                                row and column
 
                            SPC              Skips spaces in printed output
 
                            TAB              Displays printed output in a
                                             given column
 
Getting information about   CSRLIN           Tells which row the cursor
the cursor's location                        is in
 
                            POS(n)           Tells which column the cursor
                                             is in
 
Creating a text viewport    VIEW PRINT       Sets the top and bottom rows
                                             for displaying text output