Re: CONTEST

[ML Solla d012362c@xxxxxxxx]

First - I'm glad to see you soliciting input from others. It
reminds me of the old printed newsletters that used to circulate
in the days when a dearth of documentation led a small cadre of
users to teach each other the tricks of the trade. (Sound
familiar?). But the purpose is defeated if the entrants (all 6 of
them!) submit their stuff privately.

Second - I don't want a "prize". I don't use Version 4. It seems
to me that the value of an exchange of this sort is in the ideas,
the routines, the methods - not the particular task. And .. for
xpl to mean something to a particular user, it has to be personal
to his or her business. So, that said, here's a description of a
couple of little routines that might have some stand-alone
application for others.

Purpose: when I do command line math, the following code,
assigned to a sgt, (has to be run from memory to preserve what's
on the command line) puts the answer in the file. Simple enough
eh?

>GT SI  grab cmd
line / parse out the = sign / go text insert everything after the
equal sign

a companion macro moves an intermediate result to beginning of
command line for further operations:
>BC  grab cmd
line / parse out the = sign / blank cmd line of all but
everything after the equal sign.

Seems very elementary, but the reason for using this macro is to
avoid any possibility of mis-typing the result into the text.

Here's another one I've found useful. There's always something
(some string) contained in 200 files that has to be changed
across all of these files for some reason. (the secretary quits,
the post office changes my box number, etc.) This program, I call
it xchg, prompts the user to enter a file specification (such as
c:\xy\c\*.doc); a search string; and a replace string. It then
calls a batch of files to the screen one after another and
changes the fixed text string input by the user to the new string
across each of the files where it finds a match. In its "public"
state it stops on the first match found in each file to verify
that the user wants to execute the change throughout the file and
is case sensitive (cia rather than ci). The reason for the stop
is to *hopefully* prevent someone from changing text contained in
an executable or sgt file. It does require at least one open
window and nw default set to 1. It runs in normal display mode
so it doesn't change what it can't see (i.e. text contained in
_some_ formatting triangles).


Joe Solla d012362c@xxxxxxxx