Basic Question

edited out.

 

What the fuck is this, BASIC? Doubt you'll find much help on here my friend, nobody's touched that shit in a professional manner in at least a decade. Why they're teaching you that deprecated language is beyond me.

I've never done BASIC before, but if I had to give you answer it'd be that do-while loop. You're clearing the commandline and reprinting every single iteration as long as a$ is smaller than 6. The logic is weird and wrong imo. You should be looking at asking for input once, checking length, then repeating the process if it is smaller than 6. Right now, the way I see it, you're printing your line a shitload of times and clearing then asking for input. The "?" might be some kind of overflow error result or something.

 

Thanks for your input blupig, I'll re-work it when I get back to my workstation and see if that fixes it.

And yes unfortunately it is BASIC -.- They use it as an introduction to programming in some of the computer science classes, don't ask me..