Programming the Atari with BASIC

I mentioned in an earlier post that I learned to program on my Atari 400 and 800XL, starting with Atari BASIC.

Compared to other BASICs of that era, Atari BASIC was a little odd. Perhaps the biggest oddity was its string support. In other BASICs, you created a string by putting $ at the end of the variable name. So you could write something like this¹:

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