Hands up all those who helped justify their purchase of a VIC with the idea that they would use it for information storage and educational programs. OK, this one's for you.

In fact it's not one but three programs. They are all in Basic. What's more thay are nothing that the average programmer with say 100+ hours programming experience couldn't knock off over a weekend without raising a sweat.

There's Data File, Data Sort and Data Test. Data File sets up or searches and updates a very simple data base in the form of a two column list. You could, for example, use column one for names and column two for phone numbers or birthdays.

Data Sort reads in data (in the same format) sorting it either alphabetically or numerically, ready to be re-recorded.

Data Test allows you to test data already entered, so that if your data was Kings and Queens of England with the years they reigned, it would pick sovereigns at random and ask you the dates.

The programs work on any size VIC, so only the memory size you have limits the amount of data. If you want more than one hundred items in your list, though, you would have to change the array dimensions.

The standard of programming could not be called elegant, structured or easy to follow, but it does at least seem to work.

B.J.