Radio Shack TRS-80 Trsdos & Disk Basic Reference Manual page 166

Appendices
Glossary
access
The method
in
which information
is
read
from
or written to disk;
see
random
access
and sequential
access.
address
A
location in
memory,
usually specified as
a
two-byte hexadecimal
number.
The
address range
<0
to
FFFF>is
represented
in
decimal
as<0
to
32767 > <-32768,
. .
.
,
-1
>
alphabetic
Referring
strictly
to the
letters
A-Z.
alphanumeric
Referring to the
set
of
letters
A-Z
and the
numerals
0-9.
argument
The
string
or
numeric quantity
which
is
supplied to
a
function and
is
then operated
on
to derive
a result; this result
is
referred to
as
the value of the function.
array
An
organized
set
of elements
which can be referenced
in total or
individually,
using the array
name
and one
or
more
subscripts.
In
BASIC, any
variable
name
can
be
used
to
name
an
array;
and
arrays
can have one
or
more
dimensions.
AR(
)
signifies
a
one-dimensional
array
named AR; AR(
,
)
signifies
a
two-dimensional array
named AR;
etc.
ASCII
American
Standard
Code
for
Information Interchange. This
method
of coding
is
used to store textual data.
Numeric
data
is
typically
stored
in a
more
compressed format.
ASCII
format
disk
file
Disk
files
in
which each byte corresponds
to
one
character
of
the
original data.
For
example,
a
BASIC
program
stored
in
ASCII
format
"looks like" the
program
listing,
except that
each character
is
ASCII-coded.
Compare
to
compressed-format
file.
background
task
A
relatively
slow routine
which
the
computer
executes along with
other
background
tasks,
and
which
is
subject to interrupts.
When
the interrupt-driven
tasks are
completed, the
background
task
continues.
See foreground task, task.
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