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Getting Started With Radix
19
through this manual to find the function that you want to use. By
translating the codes from the system that we use, to the system
that your commercial software uses, you should be able to use
many of Radix's advanced features. It may help, however if we
look at a couple of examples. In the next three chapters, we'll give
examples of many of Radix's codes using many popular pro-
grams.
The escape code
There's one particular ASCII code that we are going to be
using more than all the rest. This is ASCII 27, which is called
escape. With all of Radix's advanced features, there weren't
enough single ASCII codes to go around. So escape is used to start
sequences of control codes that open a wider range of functions to
us.
While you must call this code CHR$(27) in BASIC, we are
going to refer to it as ( ESC) in this book. This will make it much
easier to recognize when we use it.
A typical
escape
code
sequence
starts
with
(ESC) which is
followed by one or more codes. As an example, the escape code
sequence to turn on italic print is:
(ESC)
"4"
We'll learn more about these escape code sequences and how
to use them in the chapters that follow.
Using this book without learning BASIC
Throughout the latter part of this book we will be teaching
you how to use all of Radix's features using the BASIC program-
ming language in our examples. This is because it is easy to com-
municate with Radix from BASIC and because, despite its
shortcomings,' BASIC is the nearest thing to a universal language
among users of personal computers. But it's not the only way to
communicate with Radix, as you will see in the next chapters.
Even if you don't know BASIC, you can learn how to use Radix's
features by reading on. When you find a function that you want to
use, just apply what you already know about translating from one
name for codes
to
another. The examples will still show you how
the commands are used, even if you are not using BASIC.
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