# Working With Characters

RETRO provides words for working with ASCII characters.

## Sigil

Character constants are returned using the `$` sigil.

## Namespace

Words operating on characters are in the `c:` namespace.

## Classification

RETRO provides a number of words to determine if a character
fits into predefined groups.

The primary words for this are:

* `c:consonant?`
* `c:digit?`
* `c:letter?`
* `c:lowercase?`
* `c:uppercase?`
* `c:visible?`
* `c:vowel?`
* `c:whitespace?`

There are also corresponding "not" forms:

* `c:-consonant?`
* `c:-digit?`
* `c:-lowercase?`
* `c:-uppercase?`
* `c:-visible?`
* `c:-vowel?`
* `c:-whitespace?`

All of these take a character and return either a `TRUE` or
`FALSE` flag.

## Conversions

A few words are provided to convert case. Each takes a character
and returns the modified character.

* `c:to-lower`
* `c:to-number`
* `c:to-upper`
* `c:toggle-case`

RETRO also has `c:to-string`, which takes a character and
creates a new temporary string with the character.

## I/O

Characters can be displayed using `c:put`.

```
$a c:put
```

With the default system on BSD, Linux, and macOS (and other
Unix style hosts), `c:get` is provided to read input. This
may be buffered, depending on the host.