Re: XY and Memory Weirdness

[scarter@xxxxxxxx (Stephen A. Carter)]

In article <199701311732.MAA22541@xxxxxxxx>, Annie Fisher wrote:
>So with a small file open my working available memory is 439k.
>
>I'm not suggesting that this is exemplary; it's just for comparison.

Well, from over here it looks a lot like a goal to aim for. :-)

>I'm no memory wizard, but I do thing that I know will conserve it.
>I load a PostScript driver to preview and print, but the drivers
>my startup.int loads are a CONFIG.PR3 that annotation makes bigger
>than it ought to be and a 500-byte MAIL.PR3 stripped of commentary.
>I never took ALACARTE out of the box. The killer--relatively--is
>the dicts. My USER.SP3 is just 2905 bytes, no hyphenation dict ever.
>
>My startup.int also loads 911 bytes of ldpms and 752 bytes of >99 s/gs:
>505 bytes of the latter support 311 bytes of ldpms that are part
>of the system I use for precise launch CMline/state capture and
>restoration, which is crucial to my installation. The other 600 bytes
>of ldpms and 247 of >99 s/gs are an optional backspace/del cache.
>These are the only ldpms I ever load, and the only >99 s/gs I ever use.
>
>I understand the rationale for Help xpl and appreciate Robert and Carl's
>ground-breaking work, but the 1k of memory my 6078-byte ALITTLE.HL3
>occupies is why my xpl is in orderly freestanding files that rely
>on two stand-alone runtime libraries (while, for, getch, etc. procs).
>
>ALITTLE.HL3 is the ascii char frames (gone from xyW 4), color chart,
>a default.kbd Fkey diagram (so I'll know what folks are talking about
>when they refer to keys rather than functions), and two xpl Help frames.
>One loads the rest of the launch CMline/state capture/restoration
>s/g library, the other would call other xpl frames if I used them
>(one multifunction ldpm can pass the CMline arg to this frame).
>
>My biggest self-indulgence is a fat .KB3: 11,700 bytes without commas,
>and that could change at any moment--a work in progress for a decade
>that at times has nudged 15,000.

Okay, you're obviously a plane or three beyond me, but I think I
managed to follow most of that. (I'd dearly love to take a peek at
your MAIL.PR3 file, if you're willing to show it.)

I've been thinking about it since yesterday, but I'm having a hard
time understanding how you can do so much without more programming and
save/gets. I suppose the secret is in two runtime libraries you use.
They're XPL code? Or XPL with PostScript? This is all new to me.

Forgive me if this is a topic that's been done to death here before,
but would you mind giving me a quick once-over of the mechanics of how
these libraries work? Or point me toward some resource where I could
find out on my own? I'm intrigued!

For what it's worth, Alacarte Menus never impressed me much, either,
except for Alacarte.DFL. It was always a minor mystery to me how the
system-wide defaults ended up in the printer file -- I suppose the
programmers just found it expedient that way. To me it made perfect
XyWrite sense for global values to have a file of their very own --
it's just more *elegant*, you know? -- so Alacarte.MNU I threw back,
but I hung on to Alacarte.DFL.

In any case, thanks very much for the peek inside your system. It's
been enlightening. And confusing!

--
Stephen A. Carter      High-Tech Information Center Ltd., Nagoya
                   Nagoya, Japan
http://www.hticn.com