Grant and Dr. Mark Greenberg, of North Star Computers, Inc. One notable difference with other dialects of BASIC of the time was the way in which substrings were addressed using an array-like syntax, a concept sometimes referred to as "slicing".
For example, A$(13,17) in North Star BASIC corresponded to MID$(A$,13,5) in Microsoft BASIC-derived dialects.
[6] The language used the backslash (\) instead of a colon (:) to delimit statements on a single line.
The language also added a number of direct-mode commands like BYE to exit BASIC and return to DOS, REN to renumber the lines in the program, and NULL which defined how many nulls to print after pressing return, to use as fill characters.
North Star would re-assemble the interpreter for customers with a different precision, up to 14 digits.