+ behavior and FN name restrictions unclear in the User's Guide

[aartaka]

Hi! Thanks for Vintage BASIC, I enjoy playing with it! Two things that influence my programs and that are not explained in the User's Guide are:

• Behavior of + is only defined for numbers, while the special behavior for strings (concatenation) is not mentioned. I had to try it out and hope there's no corner-cases with this plus-as-concatenation behavior.
• It's not documented how many symbols of DEF FN names are significant. One? Two? Arbitrarily many? I'm worried about having collisions and I don't know how to segment my programs due to that.

Again, thanks for your work! Vintage BASIC is a nice small system, perfect for weekend hacking!

[aartaka]

@lylek and the website seems to be down now...

[lylek]

Hi! I’m glad you’re enjoying Vintage BASIC! Thanks for your observant feedback. Yes, I definitely missed documenting the concatenation behavior of the + operator. I’ll add that to the manual! DEF FN names aren’t any different than other variable names: up to two letters and one digit. Plus a $ if they return a string. Though I realized there’s a bug in them. If you define the function to return a numeric value, and it returns a string, it should produce a type mismatch error when run. And vice versa. Thanks for your interest in Vintage BASIC! — Lyle

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On Apr 1, 2025 at 9:35:26 AM, Artyom Bologov ***@***.***> wrote: Hi! Thanks for Vintage BASIC, I enjoy playing with it! Two things that influence my programs and that are not explained in the User's Guide are: - Behavior of + is only defined for numbers, while the special behavior for strings (concatenation) is not mentioned. I had to try it out and hope there's no corner-cases with this plus-as-concatenation behavior. - It's not documented how many symbols of DEF FN names are significant. One? Two? Arbitrarily many? I'm worried about having collisions and I don't know how to segment my programs due to that. Again, thanks for your work! Vintage BASIC is a nice small system, perfect for weekend hacking! — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#5>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAKUAERENN7B6BJFWTDA4X32XK545AVCNFSM6AAAAAB2HMFTS2VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43ASLTON2WKOZSHE3DGOJWHEYDKNQ> . You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: ***@***.***> [image: aartaka]*aartaka* created an issue (lylek/vintage-basic#5) <#5> Hi! Thanks for Vintage BASIC, I enjoy playing with it! Two things that influence my programs and that are not explained in the User's Guide are: - Behavior of + is only defined for numbers, while the special behavior for strings (concatenation) is not mentioned. I had to try it out and hope there's no corner-cases with this plus-as-concatenation behavior. - It's not documented how many symbols of DEF FN names are significant. One? Two? Arbitrarily many? I'm worried about having collisions and I don't know how to segment my programs due to that. Again, thanks for your work! Vintage BASIC is a nice small system, perfect for weekend hacking! — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#5>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAKUAERENN7B6BJFWTDA4X32XK545AVCNFSM6AAAAAB2HMFTS2VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43ASLTON2WKOZSHE3DGOJWHEYDKNQ> . You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[aartaka]

Plus a $ if they return a string.

And % too, for integer-returning ones!