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1992-06-05
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ORDIGU
========
ORDIGU.COM v. 3.0
(c) Pierre Jelenc 1991
ORDIGU.COM is a sorting program that alphabetizes text in English
or Esperanto (in the EZo system that uses ASCII 166, 224, 236-235
for the accented letters).
ORDIGU is designed to work under DOS 3.0 or higher, including the
4DOS command processor from JP Softaware (free plug for a highly
recommanded shareware replacement for Command.com). ORDIGU will
not work under DOS 2.0, since temporary file creation and some
error handling require functions available only starting in 3.0.
This version now exits gracefully if it detects an earlier
version of DOS.
ORDIGU is able to sort files of any length containing up to
32,766 records. The records may be terminated either by <CR><LF>,
i.e. ASCII 13 ASCII 10 (That is the combination you get when you
press the "Enter" or "Return" key), or now by a user-defined
delimiter. The user-defined delimiter may be any of the following
characters:
- Control codes at ASCII 17 to 31
- The characters ], }, _, ^, ~
- The graphics characters at ASCII 174 to 223
Important: if you use one of the alternate delimiters, you must
include a blank line at the begining of your input file,
otherwise the first line would end up appended to the one it
should follow in the alphabetized list. ORDIGU will refuse to
sort a file that does not begin with <CR><LF> if an alternate
delimiter is used. The reason is that under these conditions a
record will go from the preceeding <CR><LF> to the delimiting
character.
Alphabetization ignores case ("A" and "a" are treated as
equivalent), and accepts non alphabetic characters such as
digits, punctuation, and graphics characters, except for ASCII
254 (■), which is used internally.
ORDIGU requires a fair amount of memory, and will tell you if it
is unable to load its internal tables. In such a case, try to
remove the large TSRs that are eating up your memory and try
again. ORDIGU should run in about 395,000 bytes, or 384 K of
available memory.
The sorting routines involve almost continuous disk access;
therefore it is preferable to run ORDIGU from a RAM disk for any
but the smallest files (say over 100 records). Disk access is the
slowest step, and the use of a RAM disk speeds up the processing
considerably; so does the use of a cache. ORDIGU.COM itself may
be anywhere as long as its exact path is given, or it is
accessible through your PATH.
ORDIGU creates an output file with the ORD extension added to the
name of the input file. It will not accept an input file with the
ORD extension. If the output name is already present (from a
previous session for instance), ORDIGU will not delete it;
instead it will give a machine-generated random name to the NEW
output. It is up to you to then rename your files.
To start ORDIGU, first move to a RAM disk if possible. Neither
ORDIGU.COM nor the input file have to be on the RAM disk itself,
although it will speed up the run. Type:
[Optional path to \]ORDIGU [/#] [optional path to \]Input.doc
where # is the character used as a delimiter. For instance
D:>c:\iloj\ORDIGU /] c:\tekstoj\listo
will run from drive D: the program present on drive C: in the
Iloj subdirectory, with the character "]" as the delimiter on the
file listo in the \tekstoj subdirectory. The temporary file will
be on drive D:, and the output will be listo.ord in \tekstoj.
ORDIGU creates a temporary file on the default drive (hence the
move to a RAM disk) and does the ordering from it. When the
alphabetization is done, it creates an output file with the ORD
extension in the same directory as the input file. Because
sorting can take a long time, the screen is updated at each step
to let you follow the process. If your output goes to the RAM
disk, remember to save it before turning off you computer.
What can go wrong? The only serious errors should be disk
input/output errors which will interrupt the process. Your input
file will always be safe however, because it is never written to.
ORDIGU.COM was written in assembly language, and assembled by A86
and debugged by D86 (shareware (c) Eric Isaacson). The sorting
algorithm is the 'Combsort' of S. Lacey and R. Box (BYTE, April
1991, pp 315-320).
ORDIGU can be used with non-EZo transcription systems with the
help of the conversion programs in TRANS20.ZIP
This program is copyrighted freeware, 1992.
Pierre Jelenc
Internet: pcj1@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu
Compuserve: 71022,1726