Hmmm. Lots of good thoughts on this. After lots of thinking, I'm still not sure whether I'd prefer an array returned for the color attributes or not.

GetScr($x,$y,$numchars) would be okay as is.

I suppose there are things to be said against the color mask being returned in HEX, but I actually would prefer it that way.

GetScrAttr($x,$y,$numchars)

Could return a string in HEX where every two hex numbers would represent foreground and background like:

White on black text -
GetScrAttr(1,1,5)
would return a string "0F0F0F0F0F" or something similar to that. Alternately it could return:

0,15,0,15,0,15,0,15,0,15

(this could be reversed if you assume the foreground comes first)

How do other programming languages do this?

Brian

{p.s. some programming would be simplified if the first character in a SUBSTR was numbered 0 instead of 1... although some other programming would be more difficult.. lol)