Next Sentence

["Carl L. Distefano" 70154.3452@xxxxxxxx]

For the record: In my Xy4 macro, the "sentence separator
wildcard" is the character that's obtained by executing func NN
and then hitting a period. The wildcard itself looks like a
reverse-video period. Hence it would have been more apt to
represent it with "{.}" rather than "{S}".

As to the III+ macro, Chet asks:

>> Carl, any particular reason that you wouldn't want to move
>> through the file via function NS (next sentence) to do it in a
>> single pass?

Yes, indeed, there is: I didn't think of it! I often don't do
things for that very reason (as my wife occasionally reminds me).
 So ... Use it! Func NS, I mean. It seems quite a good idea!
Another thing that didn't occur to me is that those inverted
Spanish-language punctuation marks are used to *start* sentences,
so they're irrelevant. Eliminate them. (Func
NS flags those inverted marks in both III+ and 4|Win, but it's
easy enough to "code around" that. Another caveat: With NS you
can run into endless loops at or near the Bottom_of_File -- no
default $FE in III+ -- but again, you get around it.)

Without sticking my nose where it doesn't belong, let me say
that, while I generally subscribe to the idea that XPL intended
for public consumption should meet certain minimum standards (as
exemplified by REORGaNiZe and, I hope, SmartSet), I don't think
it follows that every snippet of code that's publicly posted has
to be of "publishable" quality in order to be useful or
instructive. I wish I had a buck for every flawed, buggy or
broken PM I've run up the flagpole as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Personally,
I'm here to learn, contribute what I can, and have fun in the
process. Therefore, I see it in my interest for this space to be
a welcoming forum for all sorts of ideas -- fully-formed,
gestational or half-baked -- about
XyWrite and how people work with it and make it do the things
they need to do. I marvel at the variety of applications and
concepts that surface here, and have no wish to see the
interchange inhibited by notions of a
Platonic ideal in XPL or anything else -- even if the notions are my own.

FWIW, several years' of XPL-ing have led me to the wisdom that
writing code is alot like going for a dental checkup. You
revisit stuff you thought was perfect, or at least optimal, and
you wonder how all that crap got in there! So you scrape and
polish it a bit, and it's good for another six months. But
anything more than the simplest macro is never perfect, never
finished. The good news is that, for all but a few
"mission-critical" purposes, it often needn't be.

--------------
Carl Distefano
70154.3452@xxxxxxxx