It turns out that the answer command ignores the substrings "^0","^1","^2",
"^3", whenever any of these appear in the text prompt of the answer command
(probably for all variations and probably also in the "ask" command.)
This is a feature of the Dialog Manager, which treats these strings as
placeholders.
For more technical detail, see the ParamText procedure in Inside Mac Volume
I.
This article is adapted from the Claris Tech Info database.