from BASIC. For example, to ask a user to input a value, in FOCAL one would: ASK "What is your age?",AGE while in BASIC the equivalent is: With the exception of a few features that were missing from one or the other, and some relatively minor differences in syntax, the two languages are very similar. One notable exception is the in BASIC, which allowed any statement to be placed after the , making it more similar with JOSS' control structures. BASIC reversed the ordering of the code compared to JOSS, placing the conditional expression at the start of the line rather than the end; in BASIC one uses whereas FOCAL used , as in JOSS. BASIC's version has the advantage that the runtime could immediately abort reading the rest of the statement if the expression was not true. In contrast, FOCAL's was more like BASIC's computed goto, , but the allowed any number of lines as targets, as opposed to only three for negative, zero and positive as in JOSS and FOCAL. Another major difference between the two is that FOCAL lacked inherent support for strings as data elements that could be assigned to variables. As was the case in early BASICs or FORTRAN versions before the addition of strings (in F77), this limitation was generally avoided through the use of literal strings in input and output commands. It was only when manipulating individual strings, or characters in them, that this became a significant problem. As string variables were not supported, inputting a string used a kludge that converted any characters typed in by a user to their numeric character value. For example, if one typed at an input statement, FOCAL would convert the H to "8", the numeric value of "H" in the PDP-8's six-bit character codes ("H" is the eighth letter). It would then interpret the "E" as starting an exponent, then it would try to compute "8" to the "LLO" power, which would take several seconds of CPU time and result in a value of 0.76593020E+103, not a helpful response. Nevertheless, by asking questions that would be responded to using single-letter responses, like "Do you need instructions, Y or N", programmers could test the result against known character values to produce what looked like character input. FOCAL's PDP-8 implementation used a floating point representation that represented numbers as four 12-bit words, forty-eight bits in total, with thirty-six