Handbook

2.1 Conventions Used in this Handbook The following notation conventions are used in this Handbook: KEYWORDS Capital letters indicate NS Basic/App Studio keywords and other text that must be typed exactly as shown. For the purposes of this manual, uppercase text indicates a required part of the Statement syntax. NS Basic/App Studio is case-insensitive: keywords are accepted with either uppercase letters, lowercase letters, or any mixture of the two. A keyword such as PRINT may be entered into your programs as print, Print, or PRINT. placeholders Italic text indicates a placeholder for types of information that you must supply. In the following Statement, expression is italicized to show that the EXECUTE statement requires an expression: EXECUTE expression

   Example

This Monaco typeface indicates example program code and information that is printed on your NS Basic/App Studio screen. The following example shows a line from an NS Basic/App Studio program: PRINT "Hello World!"

[Optional] Brackets indicate that the enclosed items are optional. In the following example, brackets are used to show that entering a second item to display on the screen is optional for the PRINT statement: PRINT expression1 [ ,expression2 ] Both of these PRINT statements are legal, since PRINT accepts up to 20 expressions: PRINT "Hello" PRINT "Hello","World"

| The vertical bar indicates that the items are mutually exclusive. In the following example the bar indicates that the LEN function can either be used with a string or a variable name: LEN(string | variable) 2.2 The Elements of an NS Basic/App Studio Program A program in NS Basic/App Studio is a set of Statements. Each NS Basic/App Studio program line may consist of the following elements: KEYWORD arguments 'comment A KEYWORD is a word from the language that NS Basic/App Studio understands. Examples are PRINT, INPUTBOX and IF. The Statement and its arguments determine what action (if any) will be taken by NS Basic/App Studio when the line is executed. Any text following ' on a line is a comment, and is ignored by NS Basic/App Studio. 2.2.1 Multi-Line Statements Each NS Basic/App Studio statement normally ends at the end of the statement line. If you have a very complex statement the line can be very long. This can make your programs difficult to read. You may split long statements by using the line-continuation sequence, a space followed by an underscore, ( _) at the end of the