Problem Statement

Implement a   rot-13   function   (or procedure, class, subroutine, or other "callable" object as appropriate to your programming environment). Optionally wrap this function in a utility program   (like tr,   which acts like a common UNIX utility, performing a line-by-line rot-13 encoding of every line of input contained in each file listed on its command line,   or (if no filenames are passed thereon) acting as a filter on its   "standard input."

(A number of UNIX scripting languages and utilities, such as   awk   and   sed   either default to processing files in this way or have command line switches or modules to easily implement these wrapper semantics, e.g.,   Perl   and   Python). The   rot-13   encoding is commonly known from the early days of Usenet "Netnews" as a way of obfuscating text to prevent casual reading of   spoiler   or potentially offensive material. Many news reader and mail user agent programs have built-in rot-13 encoder/decoders or have the ability to feed a message through any external utility script for performing this (or other) actions. The definition of the rot-13 function is to simply replace every letter of the ASCII alphabet with the letter which is "rotated" 13 characters "around" the 26 letter alphabet from its normal cardinal position   (wrapping around from   z   to   a   as necessary). Thus the letters   abc   become   nop   and so on. Technically rot-13 is a   "mono-alphabetic substitution cipher"   with a trivial   "key". A proper implementation should work on upper and lower case letters, preserve case, and pass all non-alphabetic characters in the input stream through without alteration.

Let's start with the solution:

1 rem rot-13 cipher
2 rem rosetta code
10 print chr$(147);chr$(14);
25 gosub 1000
30 print chr$(147);"Enter a message to translate."
35 print:print "Press CTRL-Z when finished.":print
40 mg$="":gosub 2000
45 print chr$(147);"Processing...":gosub 3000
50 print chr$(147);"The translated message is:"
55 print:print cm$
100 print:print "Do another one? ";
110 get k$:if k$<>"y" and k$<>"n" then 110
120 print k$:if k$="y" then goto 10
130 end

1000 rem generate encoding table
1010 ec$="mnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJKL"
1099 return

2000 rem get user input routine
2005 print chr$(18);" ";chr$(146);chr$(157);
2010 get k$:if k$="" then 2010
2012 if k$=chr$(13) then print " ";chr$(157);
2015 print k$;
2020 if k$=chr$(20) then mg$=left$(mg$,len(mg$)-1):goto 2040
2025 if len(mg$)=255 or k$=chr$(26) then return
2030 mg$=mg$+k$
2040 goto 2005

3000 rem translate message
3005 cm$=""
3010 for i=1 to len(mg$)
3015 c=asc(mid$(mg$,i,1))
3020 if c<65 or (c>90 and c<193) or c>218 then cm$=cm$+chr$(c):goto 3030
3025 if c>=65 and c<=90 then c=c-64
3030 if c>=193 and c<=218 then c=(c-192)+26
3035 cm$=cm$+mid$(ec$,c,1)
3040 next i
3050 return