date$ -- returns a string with various components of the current date

a$=date$

The date$-function (which must be called without parantheses; i.e. date$() would be an error) returns a string containing various components of a date; an example would be 4-05-27-2004-Thu-May. This string consists of various fields seperated by hyphens ("-"):The day within the week as a number in the range 0 (=sunday) to 6 (=saturday) (in the example above: 4, i.e. thursday).

The month as a number in the range 1 (=january) to 12 (=december) (in the example: 5 which stands for may).
The day within the month as a number in the range 1 to 31 (in the example: 27).
The full, 4-digit year (in the example: 2004, which reminds me that I should adjust the clock within my computer ...).
The abbreviated name of the day within the week (Mon to Sun).
The abbreviated name of the month (Jan to Dec).

Therefore the whole example above (4-05-27-2004-Thu-May) would read: day 4 in the week (counting from 0), May 27 in the year 2004, which is a thursday in May.
Note, that all fields within the string returned by date$ have a fixed with (numbers are padded with zeroes); therefore it is easy to extract the various fields of a date format with mid$.

rem   Two ways to print the same ... 

print mid$(date$,3,10) 

dim fields$(6) 
a=split(date$,fields$(),"-") 
print fields$(2),"-",fields$(3),"-",fields$(4) 

This example shows two different techniques to extract components from the value returned by date$. The mid$-function is the preferred way, but you could just as well split the return-value of date$ at every "-" and store the result within an array of strings.