Zgrass was based on a standard set of BASIC commands and used most of its syntax. Where Zgrass differed from BASIC was that all commands were in fact functions and returned values, similar to the C programming language. If there was no obvious return value it was expected that a function would return 1 if it succeeded, and 0 if it failed. For instance, the command codice_1 would be illegal in BASIC, but in Zgrass this would print codice_2, the 1 being the value returned by second codice_3, meaning "I successfully output the string '10'".