Well, in Lite-C strings have a variable length, but in C-Script, a string couldn't get longer than its original length. That's why the "#n" is there, so you can create long empty strings you can fill with text. Even in Lite-C, you still need to do that for inkey(). Frankly, I never used the "#n" either, because when I needed a string like this for inkey() I always just put in the spaces directly, because it didn't need to be so long that "#n" would ever be necessary.