What was really cool is that MID$ was an lvalue and, if I remember correctly, could be assigned a string of a different length from its present value, i.e., you could replace n characters in the middle of a string with m new characters. Before I discovered Perl, I used to think QBasic was *the* language for string manipulation and text-munging jobs. (Of course, these days lots of languages can do that stuff. But back then, Borland C++ was the hot new thing, and it didn't have *anything* like MID$.) ISTR that LEFT$ and RIGHT$ had these properties too, but MID$ was the most general and therefore the most useful.