Dias -

Thank you. I appreciate your COMMENT. However ....

Eventually my programs will be ported to UNIX and I need to be able to develop them in DOS so that I can port. Qbasic is a Microsoft Language, that does not exist in UNIX.

If I COULD rely on your expertise, to "think outside of the box", it would be appreciated. In other words, lets see if we can think in an innovative way to solve this.

Does anybody else on this forum have any ideas??

Thanks again.if this is going to be proted to unix, why not transfer the files into unix environment and MAKE use of unix utilities like integer arithmetic at the ksh prompt. What you are trying to do seems to be impossible in the pure dos environment unless you can find a dos COMMAND line calculator to give you increments.

qbasic, along with being from microsoft, is pretty benign language and very easy to comprehend. I believe there are even some free basic interpreters which can use the qbasic code with little to no modification. so learning it would not be so bad of an idea. If you have the basic understanding of programming languages, you are more than half way thru anyways.

good luck