Re: Giving up on giving it up ...

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

Marge,
By coincidence, I'm also 62. By non-coincidence, I also resist starting
over again to learn new software.
However, the good news is that you are making things too hard on yourself.
To wit:
1. Xy runs fine on XP and, early reports are, on Vista. The most you'll
encounter in problems is tweaking things for the most pleasant colors and
cursor-speed (unless you want to work in full-screen mode: for that, no
adjustment is required).
2. In the next 10 years, you're not going to have problems getting older
laptops. Just buy them on eBay or at computer fairs. With tens of millions
of these having been sold, they aren't going to disappear off the planet,
and even used computers probably will work--but, if you like, buy (cheaply)
several to be safe.
3. Rather than mess with dual-booting and that sort of stuff, if you want
to reserve Xy for some older operating system, on an older computer (which
I don't recommend, but . . .), just get a home network (it's cheap) to
transfer stuff between them. To blow your mind: I just went to the
Start/Run thingy on my XP laptop (on which I'm typing this email) used
"Browse" to get to my wife's computer over the home network, found
EDITOR.EXE on her computer, and "opened" it (i.e., launched it). Xy opened
up on my computer. (Okay, I admit, she also is running XP, but I don't
think that matters.)
4. The one modernizing slight challenge I'd recommend you meet is to try
Xy4, which is an improvement over Xy3. But that's entirely optional. It
will make your XPL programming easier, not least because it has a "comment"
facility. Anything after the string ;*; is ignored in the XPL. So where Xy3
code looks like this:

≪...≫≪...≫≪...≫text≪...≫text≪...≫≪ex≫

in Xy4, the same code can be formatted and commented like this:

≪...≫;*;
≪...≫;*; This is a comment on what the program is doing here
;*;
≪...≫text;*; This is another comment
≪...≫text≪...≫;*;
≪ex≫
You understand that "≪...≫" is my way of indicating whatever code that
might be, including PFUNCs, and "text" indicates text that the program
"prints" to the screen when it's run.
So you can add carriage returns, blank lines (preceded by ;*;), and
comments at will.

Bottom line: fear not, and you need not rush to the store to buy new laptops.

Harry Binswanger
hb@xxxxxxxx