Delay loops were usually a for loop designed to pause the game for a second or two. They were used to keep all the text of a chunk from being displayed at once. The usual delay loop looked like this :

print "You are dead."
for d = 1 to 2000:next d
input "Play again? (y/n)", a$

This was great when computers were slower. With modern computers, this approach doesn't work as well. The first problem is that modern computers are faster and will blow through a for loop with blazing speed. The second problem is that in the modern computer era people have computers of differing speeds.

These days, it is better to use sleep:

print "You are dead."
sleep 2000
input "Play again? (y/n)", a$

sleep also has another feature - if the player presses any key, the game will continue, even if the number of milliseconds has not elapsed. This is useful if the player doesn't want to wait.

Related Pages

• Loop
• Timing