Q2 and fat characters

[TBaehr@xxxxxxxx]

Charles Creesy: We (I worked for Xyquest) started out with the parentheses in
developing menu routines, but soon found out that the parens were getting in
the way (as you saw in a recent post). So one of our engineers came up with
the Q2 thing. The reason you'll see parens still in the dialog box routines
in XY4 and XW is that some commands are sure not to have a paren in them
[like BX (es 1)], and the code didn't suffer from leaving them that way. I
use Q2 mostly just for consistency's sake now, but I'm not above typing a
pair of parens on a whim (?). No room for whimsy in "serious" programming, I
know. 

Now if you really don't want to use Q2, you can use other pairs of characters
-- [ and ] should work, as should { and }. I haven't tried them, but I think
even < and > will work. Just be sure your routine will never have any of
those characters as a command argument (as can happen when you use a variable
as an argument).

Michael Norman: If you want readable characters, you could run Xy4DOS in a
DOS box in Win 3.1. That's what I do, all day, every day. You may have
reasons for using the Win version, I realize, but the DOS version works for
me (and it's more robust, and it's faster).

Tim Baehr
TBaehr@xxxxxxxx