In with the new

[Peter Brown pbrown@xxxxxxxx]

Nathan writes:
>Anyone with an idea for a program, send the idea to
the list. Anyone with a program, send it to anyone who wants
it.

Well, I may be simply unaware that this has been done, and I don't think
I could program the XPL myself.

But Robert Holmgren's program for jumping from a word in a Xy file to
that same word in Roget's Thesaurus (1911 ed.) has me thinking about the
varieties of hypertext from within XyWrite:

1. My boss writes columns and speeches full of quotations from the
famous and the dead. How 'bout hooking up words in Xy files to a
version of Bartlett's online?

2. Better yet, the Gutenberg Project http://promo.net/pg/ is full of
classics of literature in the public domain (Anon. to Zola). That
suggests a download to one's own hard drive, whereupon a call is made
from the Xy file to any of the user's favorite authors. For example, it
happens I have Gutenberg's version of the Federalist Papers on my HD.
Suppose I want a quote about inefficiency. If I highlight the word, up
pops the sentence:

"AFTER an unequivocal experience of the inefficiency of the subsisting
federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new
Constitution for the United States of America."

Maybe yes, and maybe no. But the point is clear.

The program could get fancy. It might do a global search of an entire
directory (say, c:\classics), into which the user has stored the
literature files of his choice (using the command

se c:\classics\*.*/TARGET WORDS/

from within an empty open screen). The program might even copy, say,
the 100 bytes to either side of the target word to a new dummy file,
along with the path and file name of the citation, for each occurence of
the target word on the directory. The dummy file could be more
convenient for viewing that the originals--very much like the hit list
produced by the Web search engines--though experience with those
engines, plus common sense, shows that the number of occurrences of
"inefficiency" across 50-100 booklength files might be large enough to
exemplify the word itself. But you get the idea.

3. Finally, if XPL programs can jump around like this, why not make 'em
jump to Web search engines or to the user's favorite Web sites. Is this
possible in XyDos (without XyWin)? For instance, a Website I found
recently converts a place name into longitude and latitude coordinates
http://fallout.campusview.indiana.edu/mapfinder/. Could one put the
cursor on a place name from a Xy file, pass the argument to this
Website, and get the coordinates back into the file?

Or, perhaps, a simpler exercise: grab info about a highlighted word in a
Xy file from a CD-Rom copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Maybe the best thing would be to devise several dummy programs of this
type with modules that the group could play with and customize.

Peter Brown
pbrown@xxxxxxxx