The BASIC INPUT statement is a useful way to ask questions and gather answers from the user while a program is running. For example, to ask someone for their name, you can use the program line: 10 INPUT "Name ;";name$. When the program runs, Name? is printed on the screen (notice that the question mark is automatically added), the system waits for the user to type their name and press [RETURN], and then stores the result in the name$ variable. However, there are some interesting variations you can apply to this method.

1. To prevent the question mark from automatically appearing at the end, use a comma instead of a semicolon right after the text enclosed in quotation marks. Thus, the instruction INPUT "Press <RETURN>",zzz displays 'Press <RETURN>' on the screen and waits for the user to do so. As a side effect, the variable zzz is assigned a value of zero, but you can simply ignore it.

2. To save the trouble of always having to press [RETURN], a different technique can be used. If you want to prompt the user to 'press any key to continue', you can use the lines provided in the source code listing.