Re: DW function

[Robert Holmgren holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

Reply to Timothy Olson:

>> It's not a "feature", or a "non-feature" -- it's simply behavior...

> Consistency, that's all.

OK, but I see no logic or benefit to DeFining a word, and schlepping a
period around with it (when you MoVe it or CoPy or rubout or whatever --
the commonest reasons for DFing in the first place). It makes no sense.

My view, in general, is this: XyWrite is a *configurable* word processor.
The factory install is just a suggestion, and also a means of teaching by
example -- nothing more. The *expectation* is that you'll roll your own.
Indeed, that's the primary reason to use XyWrite in contrast to other WPs.
(The fact that so few people in aggregate do configure has always
astonished me, and I think it astonished the inventors as well. It
signifies what a bunch of sheep computer users -- and maybe people in
general -- really are. In the early 80s, when this thing was conceived,
the controlling principle was still to bend computers to the individual
will. Now it's nothing more than to bend users' wallets with a succession
of binaries that users can't control. It's pathetic and saddening.)

Consistency is a virtue, I agree. If people just realized that the whole
Xy4 factory-issue approach was simply a radically different *suggestion*,
an eye-opening alternative, to the Xy3 way, they would more easily have
seen that they could toss the whole thing and just use Xy4 like Xy3 --
exactly, if that's what they preferred (for consistency, or whatever
reason).

But I also favor perfecting the behavior of the atomic particles of the engine,
and I think this DW anomaly is an example of just that:
a refinement. You disagree, but to me, hauling that period
around is nuts.

BTW, when I said "Try it, you'll like it", I meant the DW code snippet, not
U2. But you too will like U2. Libraries are so much more economical than
individual programs. And you don't need to "set aside a day" to get
acquainted. It takes five minutes to understand how to install, and after
that you can take your time, the thing rests very lightly on your system
(virtually no overhead at all); you can tack on your own programs (at the
end, BTW, so that at any time you can plug in refreshed versions of our
code without disturbing your own code) whenever you get around to it; you
programs will operate with the same transparent ease as ours do. As for
"the recent revision", in fact we issue (without announcement) a new
version every few days, quashing bugs, adding and perfecting and refining
routines, simplifying, ensuring XyWin compatibility (a major thrust of mine
recently) -- it's a process. I think we're up to v011 now, and the
improvement over v001 is significant. So it may be worthwhile, from time
to time, to grab the latest issue; swapping them in and out while retaining
(transferring) your personal user settings is simple, there are reliable
built-in programs that do all the work. We'll be adding a canned index of
routines soon, to supplement the index (Hlist) that you can generate at any
time, making it easier for first-timers to get a handle on the contents.
Thanks for the words of support.


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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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