XPL Functions vs. external utilities

[jroth@xxxxxxxx (Joel Roth)]

This is a second message in response to collective postings on
the list.

We all know what a pain it is to write programs in XPL. That
said, XPL is *great* for what it was designed--customizing the
Xywrite user interface. Most of these programs are fairly small.

But it is awkard for more complicated text processing. For
example, I needed to extract footnotes and leave numbers in the
text before submitting translation files via modem.

XY-way  XPL programs prints to file with STRIP.PRN to collect
     footnotes, then I run another utility to delete the
     LF characters the print driver insisted on
     including in the text.

My-way  I wrote a program in perl that does the same job.

Another client needs two spaces after a period. A shareware
utility called SNR (search 'n replace) does this fine, and I
tell it to ignore periods in such uses as Dr., U.S., Aug., etc.
(Of course perl could do this, too)

Trying to do this in XPL would be a nightmare.

My conclusion here is that life will be much easier if you don't
try to use XPL in ways it's not really suited, and encourage
people to find other ways.

IMO, the much maligned *bloat* factor in WP programs comes from
trying to use one program for everything.

I think it'd be fruitful to discuss tasks that are awkward in Xy
and see about other ways to do them. I was quite intrigued by
Annie Fisher's discussion of Postscript, although I'm not quite
ready to invest the time.

--
Joel Roth