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Re: Programming 

By: Zimbler0 in 6TH POPE | Recommend this post (1)
Sat, 29 Aug 20 5:34 PM | 26 view(s)
Boardmark this board | 6th Edition Pope Board 		Msg. 05349 of 60014
(This msg. is a reply to 05342 by Decomposed)
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Sounds very interesting, De.

I remember my college days . . . my school had a minicomputer
somewhere . . . I was taking Fortran - part of my curricula
leading up to microprocessors. (8 bit very interesting things).
(Shortly after punch cards was popular . . . Thank God I missed those.)

Anyway, most of the time the Fortran was slow and I'd wait
several seconds. One time it snowed . . nobody else was on
it and I got more done in less time . . .

I also remember Borland Pascal on the Macintosh . . . but so
many years ago I don't remember how any more.

But what I would really like to know . . . is what the #3!! is
that diabolically evil combination of key strokes that can
magically erase a message . . . and how can I break it so it
does not work at all.

Zim.




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The above is a reply to the following message:
Programming
By: Decomposed in 6TH POPE
Sat, 29 Aug 20 4:27 PM 		Msg. 05342 of 60014

When I was in school long ago, in the days before the personal computer, my college had a single mainframe computer with a few hundred Teleray terminals scattered around the campus. I spent a lot of time on those terminals, memorizing the user manual and becoming proficient at getting them to do things most students didn't know how to do. One of the things I really liked was that they had programmable function keys which could be loaded with any set of characters the user desired, including command characters that altered the behavior of the terminal, and template characters that were timesavers.

When the IBM PC came along, I was jazzed to see that the keyboard included a row of function keys across the top, even as it does on computers today. I found it disgusting, and still do, when I learned that they are not programmable. Programs can be written to perform a certain way if an F7 or F3 are pressed, but users can't actually program function keys to do things that are useful - such as spitting out instant templates for office memos or for letters to mom or, in my case, html for various effects that I like.

This week, I've been playing around with Lazarus - a free and very high-quality Pascal compiler that is reminiscent of Borland's old Turbo Pascal and, in its graphical mode, Borland's Delphi. One of the things I decided to try to figure out was whether I could manipulate the cut and paste buffer, so that running my program can pull the contents from the buffer, modify those contents, and load them back into the buffer. I got it working faster than I thought! Now I'm going to try something a little more ambitious, writing a program that allows me to store numerous templates and easily load them into the cut and paste buffer so that it can be applied in the manner that function keys should have been applied all those years ago. Seems pretty doable to me, and extremely useful…


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