HP 3000 Manuals

HP Business BASIC/XL Reference Manual

Chapter 5  Functions 

Introduction 

HP Business BASIC/XL has a set of predefined standard functions.  These
functions do not need to be defined to be called, nor is a calling
statement necessary.  They can be treated like any expression.  For
example, in the program below, Bnum and Cnum are assigned the return
value from the ABS function.

     10  Anum = -10
     20  Bnum = ABS(Anum)                !Absolute value function
     30  Cnum = ABS(3)                   !Absolute value function
     40  PRINT Anum,Bnum,Cnum,ABS(-24)   !Prints -10,10,3,24

The return value for each function has a specific data type.  You can,
however, assign the return value to a variable of a different type, and
HP Business BASIC/XL will convert the return value to the type of the
variable that the function is assigned to.

MPE/iX 5.0 Documentation