Chet G Re: XPL

[holmgrn@xxxxxxxx]

>> RJH:
>> no new command that I can recall -- between II+ and Signature).
>
> Chet Gottfried
> I trust you mean between III+ and Sig.

Nope, II+. What was added? Nothing. (Does memory serve?
Hmmmm. Okay, SU and GT, which are really just flavors of SV and
PV, around the time of Xy3.10; and hmmmm extended permanent S/Gs
100-999 a little before that, say 3.0. What else? Zilch.) In fact,
II+ either implemented or proposed to implement a couple of
things I'd dearly love, like command BR, which (according to
specs of that era circa 1983) was defined as "BR (restart
condition)--breaks from the program until a character matching
the restart condition is encountered." Now, I'm not entirely
sure what that means, but if it was something like WHILE...WEND, and not just
| or what evolved into the BR# command (which
+|- allows wending but not completely freely), then XPL needs it
desperately -- it's about the weakest link in the language. II+ had unaries like
@RND, @REM -- whatever happened to them? And speed! (You think
III+ was fast! I disagree with you anent IV, BTW; on strict
benchmark numbers, yes, simple procedures are faster in III+; but
the pithy terseness of the IV command set gives you so much more
power, saves so much programming time, that going back to III+
would be a real deprivation -- IMO.)

>> In III+, Sig, and early IV, it frequently happened in blocks
>> of XPL that there were characters that appeared at the
>> beginning or end of lines -- on the line wrap, in other
>> words -- which didn't display properly, and which the cursor
>> would "hop over" -- refuse to rest upon.
> > A III+ solution, which I use since most of my Xy files are
> ultimately for either Ventura or Quark, is to simply move the
> cursor CR while reading the cursor position before and after. If
> a jump other than 1 or 2 occurs, CL and then linear right and
> delete, since linear right doesn't "jump."

Sure, *if* you're eyeballing it and editing manually! (You can
also use the JMP command, it goes right to the spot.)
But how do you automate that in XPL, say if you're using the
SEarch command? SEarch flies right past those problematic
strings, as if they didn't exist! So each time you locate a
searched text, XPL has to perform a bunch of checks to make sure
it didn't skip something. We're talking tortoise.
These bugs are *major* hassles, and as often as not the
workarounds open up new problems.

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Robert J. Holmgren holmgrn@xxxxxxxx
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