From: James Curran (JamesCurran_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-04-15 12:53:54
The fact that the format string was up front was way done on the list of
advantages of PRINT USING (so far that many would consider it a
disadvantage, or at least were neutral about it).
The primary advantage of the Basic PRINT USING was that it offered
formatting options that were difficult any other way. For example:
f = 1.0
print using "###.##"; f ' prints " 1.00" (exactly six
characters)
otherwise you'd have to write:
f = 1.0
S$ = str(f)
i = instr(S$, ".")
if i = 0 then S$ = S$ + ".00"
else S$ = Left$(S$+"00", i + 2)
S$ = right$(" " + S$, 6)
print S$
-- Truth, James Curran www.NJTheater.com (Professional) www.NovelTheory.com (Personal) "Mattias Flodin" <flodin_at_[hidden]> wrote in message news:20020409095833.A16488_at_ronja.cs.umu.se... Personally, I think the latter. It is interesting to note that the PRINT statement in BASIC had cout-style printing from the start; the printouts were concatenated using ";" or "," operators, if one can call them operators. However, for the sake of readability and ease-of-use, many dialects later added the PRINT USING statement that allowed to you to provide a (type independent, i.e. no loss of type safety) format string first, and then let the arguments to the string follow.