If you can't press the home button and the system locks up, it's almost certainly a bug. Nintendo wouldn't want any game locking up their system; even in games like Smash where the home menu is disabled a lot, you can obviously still navigate.
Pretty sure it's because your multipling a non number by a very large number
I just found something interesting regarding this. If you run A$="GET REKT U SKRUB"*99999, it takes no time at all to run. However, it takes 50 seconds to execute ?A$
This seems to indicate that SmileBASIC stores expressions to variables instead of evaluating them before storing.
EDIT: It was pointed out that the 50 seconds might be from SmileBASIC trying to fit it on the screen, and it seems like this is what is happening.
I'm pretty sure printing doesn't take much time.
But 99999 is a big number, so it could be anything.
I can confirm that printing the last character of the really long string by index (?A$[1599983]), takes next to no time. This suggests that the full string value is composed at the time of the assignment, that it doesn't take long, and that the delay is really in PRINT when it is given a ridiculously long string.
I remember that in Petit Computer, printing took a long time because, after the screen was full, every print statement had to push every character up one space and only then print the first string on the bottom line. (or the other way around, since the last line is usually left blank)
It's possible that the same thing is happening here, but so many lines are printed at once that it takes that long.
According to my calculations the print would be 32,000 lines long. Every line (except the first few, until the screen is full) has to iterate through every character on the screen - that's 30*50 = 1500 characters on the screen to move up per line.
1500 * 32000 = 48,000,000 "move character up" operations - each one taking a very small amount of time, but clearly they add up.
?" "*9999 freezes for under a second
?CHR$(10)*9999 freezes for around 15 seconds
In case you were wondering:
Yes, those are 99,999 "GET REKT YOU SKRUB"s. A total of 1,599,984 characters, plus my message at the top.
EDIT: It appears that the site took off a lot of those GET REKT U SKRUBs. That's only 4,093.
EDIT #2: Apparently there's so much text, I can't even post to pastebin. I exceeded the 512 kilobyte limit. The .txt file is 1.52 megabytes OF TEXT.
Much larger operations like S$="A"*1048576 (a string totaling 2MiB) also take a brief moment to execute (blink and you'll miss it, but it's there.)
so yeah we can guarantee that it's the print taking the time