Esoteric Programming Languages > Come Here >

Lesson 5

Strings and Input

Representation of Strings

A string in Come Here is represented as an integer.  For a string of one character, this integer is simply the character code.  Longer strings are represented as the sum of character codes multiplied by successive powers of the character set size (normally 256).  For example:

"abc" = 97 + 98*256 + 99*65536
      = 97 +  25088 +  6488064
      = 6513249

Wherever a string appears in an expression, it is treated as its integer representation.  The TELL statement always outputs the string represented by of each of its arguments.  TELL 0 is effectively a null statement, and the result of TELLing a negative number is currently undefined.

Using this representation, it is simple to convert a number between 0 and 99 inclusive into a zero-padded decimal format ready for output:

CALL "00" + qwert // 10 + 256 * (qwert MOD 10) yuiop

Receiving Input

The ASK statement is used to receive input from the user.  The form is simply:

ASK qwert

This waits for the user to input a line of text, and then assigns the integer representation of the input to the variable qwert.  Unlike TELL, ASK can take only one argument.

Hence the simple input-to-output program is as follows:

10  NOTE Example 5.1: Input to output
    COME FROM 10 + SGN input
    ASK input
11  TELL input NEXT