Change Invisible problems with BX

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Harry, I ran some tests on this, and I THINK the source of the problem
may simply be the speed (and possibly the multithreading capabilities) of
modern processors. Recall that BX is Blind Execute: it doesn't look at
what it's doing.

I created a nice long string of names (with many repetitions, defining
and copying). But I put an incrementing number at the end of each line so
that, despite all those duplications, I could see where the errors were
occurring. (I did that, by the by, with ≪C1≫ and then ran the old
hardcode.pgm against it. Contrary to reports I've seen here, that worked,
though I had to hit space or enter a couple of times when a form feed
char was encountered. Of course, that was a simple, one-layer counter.)
 These were the four names I used:
"Sophonisba Brown"	SB@xxxxxxxx
"B. Daha"	Brandoch@xxxxxxxx
"Jasper Shrig" 	Robin@xxxxxxxx
"Michael Wharton"	MW@xxxxxxxx
I wanted to keep the Michael Wharton to see if there was anything
peculiar about that particular name. (There's a Wharton State Forest
here, which inspired the made-up address.)

With a total of 718 items, the last 8 instances of B Daha, in quotes,
came at the top of the file, followed by the last 9 instances of Jasper
Shrig, the last 9 instances of the Michael Wharton, and the last 8
instances of Sophonisba Brown, all in quotes. This was followed by all
the rest of the B. Dahas, in order and no quotes, followed by all the
rest of the other names, in the proper order and sans quotes.

Since 16+18 names did not get their quotes removed, I deleted the last 34
names and tried again. With 578 names, I got 8 of each, unquoted, at the
beginning. I then tried splitting your program into two parts, one to
clear the quotes, and one to sort. That worked fine, even with the full
612 names. It rather looks as if when the two commands are in one
program, somewhere toward the end, the second part overruns the first,
and starts sorting before the quotation-removing command is finished.
(Recall that even a poky 1.1 GHz machine is running over 100 times as
fast as the PCs XyWrite was designed to work on.)

I then altered your original program to include ≪IF≪ER≫≫≪GLNEXT≫
and a Next label between the first QT and the TF command. I also expanded
the text file to 700 lines, to match yours. This time, only three lines
(one each of numbers 2, 3, and 4) did not get stripped of quotes and
sorted. If one included a routine to Press a key to continue, it would
probably work, but my manuals are over in the office and I don't recall,
off the top of my head, how to do that.

Patricia