SECTION B - PRIMER                                 FILE : PRIMER.B
                                     MATHEMATICS
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          Mallard Basic supports a good range of mathematical functions, which 
          means that it can be used for technical and accountancy programs 
          when required. This section deals with simple arithmetic only; 
          addition,subtraction, division and multiplication. This is essential 
          knowledge, and if this is all you need don't bother to go any 
          further. More information can be found in the advanced section if 
          you need it, but knowledge of maths is required 
              We look first at the operators (signs) for the four basic func-
          tions;  addition + ,subtraction - , division /,and multiplication *. 
          The first two will be familiar (+ and -) but the other two may be a 
          little strange. The * may be completely new, but the / is the same 
          as in a fraction 3/4, which is, after all, a division sum. This is 
          only a passing comment ,as BASIC does not work in fractions, only 
          decimals ( although fractions such as 6, (, 7 ,) can be printed)
              We saw,in section A that numbers can be printed alone or inside 
          double quote marks. The difference shows in this section. If you 
          print " 6+4" you get 6+4 on the screen , but leave out the quote 
          marks and the computer works out the sum for you .You will see in 
          the listing that follows how to make good use of this to write 
          complete sums such as  6+4= 10. 
              MALLARD BASIC does it's arithmetic in the same way as us, which 
          is not true of all languages. In other words you don't need to learn 
          new tricks. It also uses standard protocol; that is if you are doing 
          a sum with mixed operators, it will do multiplication and division 
          first, then addition and subtraction. If you want things done in a 
          different order, you use brackets , as you would normally do. For 
          example  (6+4)*3= 30 ; but 6+4*3=18.
              A snag with MALLARD BASIC (which it shares with most 
          calculators) is that large and small numbers are printed as scaled 
          numbers (scientific format)
              Thus 0.042 decimal might be shown 4.2E-2  which means 4.2 x(10 
          to the power of -2).  
           This probably won't bother you as the range of unscaled (ordinary 
          decimal) numbers is quite wide.
              Floating point is supported too; that is you can put in decimal 
          numbers with varying decimal places and the computor will accept and 
          process  them :for example 34.2 : 234.347 : 0.04, etc., but note 
          that leading and trailing zeros are discarded ;that is 45.340 will 
          print as 45.34 and 007 will print as 7. If you need to print this 
          type of number it must be surrounded by quote marks. e.g "007" but 
          then it can't be processed mathematically, because the computer will 
          recognise it only as a string.
              Numbers can be entered and printed in columns with the decimal 
          points in line as is often needed when making tables for statistical 
          work or dealing with sums of money. This is known as formatted 
          printing and is touched on briefly in this section. 
              The listings which follow are designed to illustrate the points 
          mentioned above. Please experiment as much as you like, as described 
          in the file INTRO.D.  Don't take anything for granted but try it for 
          yourself.                                       

          End of file PRIMER.B
ing for granted but try it for 
          yourself.