rat@madnix.UUCP (David Douthitt) (02/13/91)
jpenne@ee.ualberta.ca (Jerry Penner) writes: | In article <1731@madnix.UUCP> rat@ruth.UUCP (David Douthitt) writes: | | [.. lots of stuff about AppleWriter deleted ..] | | >For those who remember AppleWriter and scoff - I have a UseNet posting of | >WPL stuff that'll make your head spin.... :-) | | Please post it! Make my head spin. I once wrote a recursive directory | lister in WPL. Hope your head comes on a swivel base.... Here it is - several people requested this post. It's noriginally from me, but I've always been a fan of AppleWriter anyway. --------- Article 14435 of comp.sys.apple: Path: madnix!nicmad!astroatc!uwvax!uwm.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!wuarchive!wugate!uunet!cs.dal.ca!iisat!mackay From: mackay@iisat.uucp (Daniel MacKay) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple Subject: Re: WPL for Appleworks? Summary: AppleWriter & WPL Message-ID: <1989Oct30.115417.16167@iisat.uucp> Date: 30 Oct 89 11:54:17 GMT References: <8910201318.AA01526@trout.nosc.mil> <2556@cbnewsd.ATT.COM> Organization: International Information Service, Dart., NS. Lines: 61 > From article <8910201318.AA01526@trout.nosc.mil>, by rich@pro-exchange.cts.com (Rich Sims): > > > Now, back to my original statement - I said the capabilities of > Ultramacros are greater than WPL. PLEASE not that I didn't say > there were not things that WPL can do that Ultramacros would find > difficult/impossible. > > 1. I'm mainly thinking of Applewriter's/WPL's ability to embedd > control characters in the text file. That's a completely trivial use for WPL. How about - an interactive fiction game? I have an interactive fiction game INTERPRETER written in WPL- that's right, you create a file containing the game and its gotos, and this WPL program "executes" the game, showing various pages on the screen, asking questions and jumping around in the story apropo. It includes a game selection menu- you can pick which games on the disk you want to play. Called TELL, so the [P] command is DO TELL :-) - a file sorter? (don't ask how. I won't do it again.) - a document indexer- you give it the doc and a list of words to index, it generates the index? - a menu-driven goal report generator for teachers, that selects from several thousand student goals on a HD, and prints them on a page suitable for progress checks and end-of-term reports? - something I was commissioned to write. - a file stripper that strips out several columns of a wide report and formats them suitably for ingestion by the Appleworks DB? (I built this so I could syphon the INDEX report from the APPLE2-L LISTSERVer into the db) - a program that counts the number of time some string occurs in a file. - a program that changes every other " into `` and '' (or any other of some symbol into two symbols? - rot13? Yeah, the only commands available in WPL that aren't available on the keyboard are the looping commands. But looping, variables, string comparison, and conditional branches, all put together, make not a half bad language! Now, WPL is not without its faults. Programs have to be chopped up into 2K segments. Subroutines cannot be indefinitely nested- only 32 subroutine levels deep. No recursion. String compare and GOTO labels are case-sensitive. Almost no math- just integer addition and subtraction. Screen formatting is machine-dependent. Only three integer variables, (X, Y, & Z) only four string variables (A - D), and they're tiny- 64 bytes. But I'm amazed at the things that are so easy to do with this little language- the symbol counter, for instance, is only four or five lines of code! The interactive fiction game interpreter is less than a hundred. Has anyone heard of/from Lutus in the past five years? -- +---------+ IIS Public Usenet | _ | From the Halifax, Nova Scotia | (_)===| disk of ... mackay@iisat.UUCP | | daniel ...{utai,uunet,watmath}!dalcs!iisat!mackay +---------+ MACKAY@DALAC.BITNET -- That was the Original poster. I am - -- ! InterNet: ruth!rat@spool.cs.wisc.edu ! David Douthitt ! UUCP: ...uwvax!astroatc!nicmad!madnix!ruth!rat ! Madison, Wisconsin ! {decvax!att}! ! === Apple II Forever === ! Home of Mad Apple Forth and the Tiger Toolbox ! The Stainless Steel Rat