Talk:Learning Petit Lesson 1: Getting Started and the Console/@comment-5334617-20141207182905/@comment-25827645-20141208030351

Keep in mind this is a beginning tutorial for people with no programming experience; there is no reason to confuse them with string concatenation syntax from other versions of BASIC (the fact that the semicolon does something else in PRINT just makes things more confusing). I also didn't get into concatenating strings with + because there's no need for that in a beginner tutorial and that has its own quirks.

There is plenty of other weirdness with INPUT and LINPUT, but again that's too much to cover for beginners who have never programmed. I'll probably approach it in later tutorials; I haven't decided exactly how far I'm planning to go with the tutorials yet (incidentally, feel free to point me to any existing articles about Petit's language quirks; if there aren't any I'll certainly make one at some point).

Regarding reading INPUT into multiple variables, COLREAD is a function that writes to multiple variables. Now that I think about it, functions that return strings normally end with a $, but perhaps they chose not to make INPUT a function since it can return numbers *or* strings.