ITALIC CHARACTER SET
BACK 'TO ROMAN WITH ITALIC OFF
Notice that CHR$(53) turned Italic off and the semicolon at the end of
line 30 eliminated the blank line between the two lines of text.
DELete and CANcel
But suppose you don’t want that much power. Suppose you only
want to erase text in the print buffer without affecting any print
modes. Two codes do this: DELete and CANcel. DELete, which is
CHR$(127), removes the latest text character from the buffer without
affecting control codes. CANcel, which is CHR$(24), is a slightly
more powerful code. It removes all the text currently in the buffer, but
it also does not affect the control codes.
These codes are seldom used, but they can be helpful if your system
sends unwanted characters at the beginning of a program listing or a
program run. You can then use one or more DELete or CANcel codes
at the start of your program to clear out these characters.
Alternate Formats for ESCape Sequences
Activating each of the many FX features with a sequence that con-
sists of the ESCape code plus another character-string command can
be cumbersome to use and difficult to remember. Fortunately, there
are techniques for shortening the format.
The simplest method is to shorten the character-string command
that follows the ESCape code. Instead of using CHR$ and a number in
parentheses, you can use-inside quotation marks-the ASCII char-
acter that corresponds to the number. For example, you have already
seen that you can send the Reset Code with CHR$(27)CHR$(64).
Because the @ symbol is the ASCII equivalent of 64, this command
can also be typed in as CHR$(27) ” @ ” .
We use this shorter format whenever possible. To see it in your
current program, change lines 10 and 30. The ASCII symbol for the 52
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