Re: New U2 frame DDIR

["Carl Distefano" cld@xxxxxxxx]

Reply to note from "Wengier W"  (Redacted
sender "wengierwu" for DMARC) Mon, 22 Aug 2016 00:00:18 +0000 (UTC)

Wengier,

> I am wondering, though, what the "LFN Utilities" (ATTRIB, CA, CHDIR etc)
> as described in the XyWWWeb page are intended. Are they intended to be
> yet another suite of LFN commands, or something else?

The answer is "yet another". U2 is something of an archeological artifact,
in that it includes code with antecedents that go back three decades. The
work is not only mine, but also that of my co-author and friend, Robert
Holmgren. Robert invented virtually all of the "advanced" XPL programming
techniques that we use in U2; he's forgotten more about XyWrite than the
rest of us put together have ever known. Robert's and my philosophy from
the earliest days has been to write stuff that we each find personally
useful, and to make it available to the rest of the world, as is, for
whatever it's worth, to whomever may take an interest. In that spirit,
we've always accommodated each other's interests and personal preferences,
so that there are any number of routines in U2 that overlap or duplicate
the other's functionality (as one of many possible examples, compare RK
with RKOK, our two takes on a macro recorder for Xy4). In a word, the Jumbo
U2 is both a code library and a historical document. Insofar as the latter
doesn't interfere with the functioning of the former, we're content to let
them peaceably coexist.

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx