Talk:Learning Petit Lesson 1: Getting Started and the Console/@comment-5334617-20141207182905

The semicolon is also used in. In many versions of BASIC, your example  would give a syntax error, the correct way to type that command would be , and this way of writing it is also accepted by SmileBasic. For, the semicolon indicates that the two things are to be printed right next to each other, a comma indicates that there is to be a gap between the things printed (the size of the gap bringing the second printed item to the nearest 'tab stop' that is at least one space away), and in some dialects an apostrophe indicates the second thing is to be printed at the beginning of the next line down.

There is yet more weirdness with SmileBasic's  and. If anything (except ) is  ed to the line where the input prompt appears, it may... or may not... be included in the string parsed for the input values. It's pretty hideous, when you get into all the details.

One of the features of  is that it can read values into multiple variables: if, for the command , you type  , the three variables will all be assigned the appropriate values at once. Since assignment in SmileBasic only changes one variable at a time, multiple values on one input line could not be handled so simply if  were a function. Of course, the more sensible way to resolve things would be to expand the semantics of function return values and the assignment statement so that multiple variables could be written to at once, but they went with the more old-fashioned approach instead.