XPL in Xy4

["Carl L. Distefano" 70154.3452@xxxxxxxx]

chet.gottfried@xxxxxxxx:

>> So what are you favorite additions in terms of XPL with xy 4?

Well, Chet, here are a few of my fa-vor-ite things:

 - Blind execution of commands (MUCH faster, and leaves the command line alone)
 - A greatly expanded set of system VAriables, including
 and , which let you save the system date
and time to programming Save/Gets, which in turn can be parsed and otherwise manipulated
as numeric expressions and/or strings
 - The ability to operate on string literals without first saving them to
Save/Gets, adding a measure of transparency to what has to be the
most opaque language ever invented and, more importantly, making
it vastly easier to generate child processes by concatenation
(i.e., guillemets, XPL operators and 3-byte functions can be
literally "quoted", concatenated and then PV'd)
 - The ability to concatenate S/G contents and status messages into
PRompts (, )
 - The ability to evaluate user input by testing Scan Codes and
Key Codes instead of reading characters mapped to keys
 - The  operator, which complements, and eliminates problems associated with, 
 - Greatly improved display freezing (in the DOS program, but
not, alas, in Windows, where the DX function quite frankly
stinks), enabling such amenities as scrolling and "cinematic" prompts
 - The ability to use nested  ...  statements, to an
apparently unlimited level of nesting
 - The ability to save contents of programming (numbered) S/Gs as files
 - the  operator, which returns the first 77 characters of any Save/Get
 - the  operator, which parses out the xth
separator- delimited segment within  -- an extremely useful complement to the XS command
 - , which (subject to limitations) tests whether Save/Get
nn is a number or a string literal
 - , which returns valuable information about how Save/Get nn was created
 - Func ZT and its complements, func ET and , which let
you record and report the elapsed time for any operation and,
equally important, to time alternative coding methods so as to
maximize speed of execution
 - The virtual elimination of XPL-related out-of-memory
phenomena, i.e., you can run BIG programs with peace of mind; and

 - Last, but certainly not least, a much-expanded Help system,
especially the User command set subsystem (;U1; - ;U9;), where a
virtually unlimited number of XPL routines can be "compiled"
(loaded) as, e.g., a U2 file. Any such routine can readily call
and be called by, and pass data to and receive data from, any
other Help frame, which is to say, structured programming is
possible.

As I see it, any two or three of the above are worth the price of
admission, especially since "legacy" code can, in large part, be
imported as is.

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