Programs in Zgrass were referred to as "macros", and stored as strings. Both of these oddities were deliberate, as Zgrass allowed any string to become a program. For instance, codice_4 defines a string (no need for a $ on the variable as in Microsoft BASICs) containing a snippet of Zgrass code. Simply typing codice_5 from that point on would run the command(s) inside. This feature can be used in place of the more traditional codice_6 command from BASIC, but has the added advantage of having a well-defined name as opposed to an opaque line number. In addition, the command remains in the form of a string in memory and can be manipulated at runtime with standard string operations.