BASIC Sequential Files

BASIC uses BASIC sequential files for sequential processing (for example, INPUT and WRITE statements). The fields written are considered either character or numeric. Characteristics of BASIC sequential files are as follows:

• Both numeric and character fields are written as displayable characters. However, character strings are distinguished from numeric strings by the ASCII double quotation marks (X'22') that surround them.

  Therefore, character data in BASIC sequential files cannot contain ASCII double quotation marks, because they are interpreted as the end of the character string.

• Fields are delimited by ASCII commas (X'2C'). Therefore, commas are not allowed as date, time, or decimal separators.
• Each record is delimited from the next by a carriage return character (X'0D') and a line feed character (X'0A'). The end-of-file character is X'1A'.
• Records and fields are variable in length.