THE BASIC TUTOTIAL

  Hello to you all atari fans out there that are still supporting these marvelous computer.
  This is going to be our new Basic Tutorial written by Saferman Ofer from Israel.
  Many Atari users have some basic knoledge of Basic, but since I'm going to write a toturial, it is intended for everybody so the more experienced programers will have to indure the basic stuff, at least at the beginning.
  Since many Atari users are already familiar with the superb Turbo Basic, which I think it's the best Basic for the Atari ever written, will be glad because, although I'm going to write the demo programs and explanations using standard Atari Basic, I'll devote in every article a segment fot Turbo Basic according to the covered commands in that article.

  Now lets stop with the nonsense and get to work.
  So as I said, first the basics, and what is more basic than the PRINT command. The PRINT command does exactly as the meaning of the word - it prints to the screen.

For example:

PRINT "SAMPLE" - will print the word SAMPLE after presing RETURN.
  Note the use of quotation marks which is very inportant since if we will write only SAMPLE, the computer will try to print the value of the variable SAMPLE, but about variables, later on.
  Now lets try some math:
PRINT 10+5 - after pressing RETURN the computer will give the result which is 15.
  Well that, I must say, was definately basic stuff and we want to advance a little.
  First every basic program must consist of lines.The examples above were using direct mode, which is a way of entering only a few commands, but to write a Basic programm we need line numbers.So if we want, just for example to type a lot of things we will a program:

10 PRINT "THIS IS A SAMPLE"
20 PRINT "PROGRAM"

  Now after we are a little bit smarter lets start making things short.The abbreviation of the "PRINT" command is "?" - Yes just a question mark.

  We have reached the point in our education that we can discuss VARIABLES.There are 2 types of variables NUMMERIC variables and STRING variables.

  For example:

VAR=10
OFER$="THIS IS A MESSAGE"

  Variables have some restrictions.A string variable has to be DIMensioned first to let the computer now how much space you need for it. The command that performs this task is DIM or COM.

  For example:

DIM A$(10)

  This will tell the computer that you will use a string variable called A$ and it will be 10 signs long, meaning in those 10 spaces you can use any ascci sign on the keyboard.
  You can use the same name for a nummeric variable and a string variable but that could get you mixed up so it is best to avoid it.
  The next thing i would like to discuss will be arrays or two-dimensional strings. An array must be dimensioned just like a string but it can apply only for numeric arrays because the Atari doesn't have string arrays.

  For example:

DIM ARRAY(100,100)

  This will tell the computer to reserve 10000(100*100) spaces for the newly dimensioned array. It is very useful for tables because ARRAY(0,0-100) will hold the first column of a table ARRAY(1,0-100) the second, etc.
  Maybe the readers till this point will ask why don't I give more example and just stick to the basic ? Well, a few reasons:First all of this is quite easy to understand and could be even fun to experiment, second I thought it best if first I'll stick to the basics and after a partial knowlwdge of the fundamentals I'll give some tricks and longer programs to study and experiment with. There are also some overlaping issues, for example when I'll talk about graphics it will include some of the basic stuff that we will go over at first so for this time those are the most basic things and next time I'll start writing according to ordonate topics which will make understanding easier.
  So this was the intro. I hope you enjoied it and see you next time.