::)QBasic Programming / The &H hex facility

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When I type
a& = &H00008000 : PRINT a&

MS-DOS QBasic prints -32768 instead of the 65536 that I expected.  But other numbers work correctly, such as &HFFFFFFFF, which correctly results in the signed 32-bit integer value of -1.  So how do I use the &H facility so that it results in a 32-bit integer number ranging from +32768 to +65536 ?  

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First of all &H8000 is = 32768 and not 65536. &H10000 is 65536. I don't know why qbasic treats hex numbers in the range &H0 to &HFFFF as signed integers (even when assigning to long integers). The work around is to implicitly specify it is a long integer by placing an & at the end. e.g.

a&=&H8000& <----!! will give you +32768
a&=&H8000   gives you -32768

Hope this answers your question