Re: New XYENC 1/13/09 release

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

I found Harry Binswanger's 15 Jan
2009 12:12 post discouraging -- either

Harry's not paying much attention, or I'm doing a lousy job of
getting

across what the XYENC work is about.


I've been found guilty of that before. As to what XYENC is about--I take
it to be doing the same thing as U2 ENCODE.





Clue to Harry: it's not about
inventing a "better" language. XPL is what

WE HAVE to work with, and what things like U2 are written in.
XyWrite

doesn't support XyBasic, 


I think you have a misconception about XyBasic.  "XyBasic"
is the name I gave to the whole idea; the actual translation is done by
my DOS program, XyComp.exe, which "compiles" the Basic-like
text to XPL. (Later, I realized that it isn't really a compile, but a
translation, since it's one-to-one.)



Think of XyBasic as a "front end" for composing XPL. I write
all my XyWrite programs in the form of XyBasic, and then run XyComp.exe
on it to translate or "decode" it to XPL. It ain't perfect, but
it's 99%. In debugging, I do have to look at the XPL--mainly to see where
my syntax error was.



Suppose I wrote an inverse program, call it BasicXy, to translate XPL
into XyBasic language, wouldn't the pair would be doing exactly what your
pair is doing?



XYENC is a tool to make XPL
easier to work with and maintain, not to

replace XPL with the "perfect
language."


XyBasic doesn't *replace* anything. It is a more intuitive way of writing
what ends up as XPL.





Anyway, Carl mostly "gets
it," even if Harry doesn't, so maybe it's not

all my fault.


I'm sure it's partly my fault. But there's a range, even on this list,
from clueful to clueless. If I'm not "getting it" it's likely
that a lot of less folks less clueful than I aren't either. If you want
to take Robert and Carl as your standard, that's your privilege--but it's
a mighty high standard.







Harry Binswanger
hb@xxxxxxxx