Re: XyWrite for Windows

[Robert Holmgren holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to note from "Bob Brody"  Thu, 19 Dec 1996 05:32:28 +0000

> (It's been a few years since I looked at XPL and its, well, oddities.
> It's got a face only a mother could love.)

You calling me a mother or something? Well, I certainly understand the
sentiment; but I maintain that XPL's philosophy of manipulating
small sub-atomic particles, in form of functions, and it's extensive
set of environmental VAriables (and that, Bob, is the core difference with
Xy4+, an enormously expanded set of variables that simplify programming
dramatically), are together peculiarly suited to word-processing, whereas
they don't work well when, say, crunching numbers (although you can still
do it). I don't even mind the concept of Save/Gets -- it's perfectly
reasonable. The only really tortured thing is the syntactical prolixity of
dealing with Save/Gets, the fact that you've got to write an unusually
large amount of code to do anything. I am quite sorry that Xy5 has
embraced Basic as its macro language (along with retaining XPL), because
if there was ever a language unsuited to screen manipulation, cursor
positioning, etc., it's Basic.



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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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