ftp.barnyard.co.uk/2015.02.ftp.barnyard.co.uk.tar/ftp.barnyard.co.uk/cpm/walnut-creek-CDROM/JSAGE/ZSUS/WORDPACK/MACRODAT.DOC

Text File | 2000-06-30 | 12KB | 273 lines

THE DATE AT A TOUCH OF A FUNCTION KEY         April 9, 1989
by Rick Charnes                                   ^   ^
                                                Like this


MACRODAT is a nifty way I've put together for my ZSDOS/ZDDOS
system to have the date appear at the touch of a macro key while
in VDE.

REQUIRED:
--------
ZEX403    NZEX-D will NOT work here.  You can continue using
          NZEX-D as your default ZEX; you will simply be using
          ZEX403 for this application.


MACRODAT requires that, after reading your standalone STARTUP.COM
(or whatever name is used in your system), your ZCPR3 startup
procedure then access both an ARUNZ alias and a ZEX script.  If
your startup procedure doesn't now access a ZEX script at cold
boot, adding one in certainly makes for a little longer startup,
but you may judge for yourself whether it is worth it.
Considering that my startup procedure provides not only for this
but also displays to me -- in beautiful reverse video graphics --
the time I last turned my computer on, I consider it time well
spent.

I'd like to show and tell my entire startup procedure here.  I
find it so useful and am so proud of it that I'm going to
describe the whole thing.  I'll get to the date-on-the-macro-key
part fairly quickly.

In everything that follows, you will often see the letter 'l' as
a standalone command.  As an extremely frequent ARUNZ user I am
always cognizant of when I'm pushing up against the ZCPR3 command
line buffer's 200-character limit.  As flow control is an
essential part of alias programming, years ago I permanently
renamed the ELSE in my FCP to L.  If I use it three times in an
alias that's 9 characters I've saved, often meaning the
difference between a successful alias and the dreaded 'OVFL'
message.

Here we go.

My standalone STARTUP.COM alias loads LAP.COM (containing all my
environment system segments) and my hard disk, and then, extended
command processing now being available, passes control to an
ARUNZ alias named START, which is as follows:

START
if gt $dh 17
t m eve
l
if gt $dh 11
t m aft
l
if gt $dh 05
t m morn
l
t m wee
zif
dly /p4
reg s2 $dd q
go s3 $dc q
go s7 $dm q
go s8 $dd q
go s9 $dy q
laston

As explained in my TIMOFDAY.LBR, 'EVE, 'AFT', 'MORN' and 'WEE'
are all text files displaying box-graphics with messages to the
effect of "GOOD EVENING, SIR!", 'GOOD AFTERNOON!', 'GOOD
MORNING!', and 'STAYING UP TILL THE WEE HOURS AGAIN, ARE YOU?"
respectively.  You can see how IF.COM and flow control will
display one or the other of these files depending on the time of
day.  T.COM is a version of the ancient TYPEL.COM patched to NOT
translate control characters, and it types files out of my
'message library' M.LBR which contains dozens of various
'status-reporting' files such as the four above.  DLY.COM is my
version of SAK.COM patched to *not* display its "Resuming..."
message after the four seconds of sleeping are up.

Then we (quietly) set register 2 to today's date and register 3
to the current hour, in civil form.  We'll be using these later
for a couple of purposes.  Then, so we can use Naj Najarian's
great method for inserting the date into dBASE as explained in
his DBPATCHS.DOC, we put today's month, date and year into three
consecutive registers.  Since we're now using LSH, and not EASE
which eats up registers 7, 8 and 9, these three serve our
purposes perfectly.  Finally we go to the next alias, LASTON,
which was written up in my column in TCJ #37.  Its primary
purpose is to read and write the shell variable used to display
the last time we turned our computer on.  Since I wrote the
article I have modified and made much more flexible the method by
which we do this (see my DAY10.LBR.)

LASTON
q s
rs laston %startdat $$|shf %$dm$dy
rs reg s25 %pcph$dm$dy q$$|reg s26 %pcpm$dm$dy q$$| <<
   ze4 startup %$dd %$dm$dy $rf02 $dy $rf03:$dn $da

RESOLVE loads LASTON.COM, which displays the shell variable
STARTDAT containing the time we last turned on our computer.
Then the '$$|' acts as RESOLVE's substitute command-separator (be
sure to keep the space character immediately after the
'%STARTDAT') and, assuming the month of March, 1989 SHFILE sets
the current variable file to WEDNESDA.VAR.  See my DAY10.LBR for
more on this.

The first part of the next RESOLVE line is for my PCPMX+ script.
The variables named 'PCPHmmyy' and 'PCPMmmyy', where mm = today's
month and yy = today's year, hold the number of hours and minutes
respectively I have used PC Pursuit so far that month.  I set
register 25 to the value held by the string variable '%PCPHmmyy' and
register 26 to the value held by '%PCPMmmyy'.

Still using RESOLVE's multiple command separator '$|' which
translates into a ';', we come to the crucial part, our ZEX
script.  First we need to understand the rather complex commad
line we are giving ZEX here.  We've got two programs that will
resolve variables here, ARUNZ and then RESOLVE.  After ARUNZ does
its work on that ZE4 line, assuming a date of April 9, 1989 and
a time of 7:30 am, and remembering that register 2 holds the
current date and 3 the hour, we get:

ze4 startup %$dd %$dm$dy $rf02 $dy $rf03:$dn $da
             |       |     |     |      |      |
ze4 startup %09   %0489    9    89    7:30    am

The reason we previously put the date and hour into registers 2
and 3 respectively might be a little hard to fathom.  You might
ask here: why not simply use the '$dd' and '$dh' ARUNZ symbols
here instead of '$rf02' and $rf03'?

Here's why.  '$dd' and '$dh' always return their values as two
digits, even if the value is only a single digit, as they are
here.  The beauty of the $RFnn symbol (see the ARUNZ
documentation) is that it generates a 'floating decimal' result
-- if there are 2 digits you get 2, and if there is only 1 you
get only 1.  This greatly adds to the readability and
attractiveness of our result; seeing that today's date is

                       April 9 at 7:30 am

gives us a much nicer feeling than

                      April 09 at 07:30 am

which seems stilted and impersonal.  (Whaddaya expect, it's a
computer.)  I think this little extra effort is well worth it.

Ok, now let's see what RESOLVE does with what ARUNZ gave us:

ze4   startup      %09      %0489     9      89     7:30     am

ze4   startup    sunday     april     9      89     7:30     am

The '%09' and '%0489' variables are each defined in our SH.VAR
file as 'sunday' and 'april' respectively.  I explained most of
this in my TCJ article.

So this is the command line passed to ZEX, which brings us to...

DATE-ON-A-MACRO-KEY
-------------------

...the relevant part.  I have renamed Joe Wright's ZEX403, which
is necessary here, to ZE4.  The following is the ZEX script named
STARTUP.ZEX, with comments to the right.

^<^[=0:* Loading system segments *^|^>  ; Displays message, using terminal
                                        ;  cursor positioning codes
^.era date                              ; Turns console display off
                                        ;  and erases file 'DATE'
dprog                                   ; Initializes my printer
^%vde date                              ; Opens up file 'DATE' and
                                        ;  and prepares to send ZEX
                                        ;  command stream into it
$2 $3, 19$4^qs^d^kx

COMMENT: The above is the crucial line.  After opening up the file DATE, we
send (remembering our ZEX parameters as above) 'APRIL 9, 1989' as input
into the file.  Easy!  However, since all command-processor input such as
parameters are always upper case, our job isn't over yet.  We want it to
look nice, so we'll convert all letters of the name of the month except the
first to lower case.  We use VDE's CTL-^ feature which toggles case.  With
CTL-QS we return to the beginning of the line we just created which places
the cursor on top of the first character, here 'A.' Then with CTL-D we move
to the second.  Then follows a series of exactly 8 CTL-^ characters (enter
them with VDE into your STARTUP.ZEX by first holding down CTL-P, then the
'^'.  We allow for the possibility of the longest-named month,
S-E-P-T-E-M-B-E-R, and convert all letters in it after the initial 'S' to
lower case.  For shorter-named months we'll just have wasted a few extra
CTL-^'s -- no big deal.

Then with CTL-KX we save the file.  We've just created a file named 'DATE'
that consists of the exact string 'April 9, 1989'.

The rest of my STARTUP.ZEX is not germane to MACRODAT, but...

shellini                                ; Initialize shell stack.
shfile sh                               ; Return SH.VAR to default.
^.^<^[=4>^[G2Still loading...^[G0^>     ; Might be wondering what's
                                        ;  going on, so turn console display
                                        ;  ON and display 2nd message!
                                        ;  ESC-G2 turns blink mode on for
                                        ;  my Qume102, ESC-G0 turns it off.
^.shvar startdat $1, $2 $3, 19$4  $5 $6 ; All this is explained in my
                                        ;  column in TCJ #37.  Turns display
                                        ;  OFF, then writes variable to VAR file
                                        ;  to display last time powered-up.
lsh                                     ; Bye-bye, EASE!
zerr                                    ; Error handler.
^.^<^[=4 ^[T^[=4EDone.^[.^>             ; Console display back ON, say we're
                                        ;  done.

                                    * * *

Now we have our file named DATE, residing on A0:.  All that
remains is to write a simple VDE macro.  Using Fred Haines'
wonderful VDECOM or VDE's inbuilt macro editor, we simply enter:

                        q^KRA0:DATE^M^QD

The initial 'q' turns MACRO QUIET mode ON, which is very
important.  Then CTL-KR prepares to read in a file.  We respond
'A0:DATE' and ^M (carriage return) which reads in our
just-created file.  Since after a file is read in with the ^KR
command the cursor is placed at the *begining* of the file, we
simply add a 'CTL-QD' to place the cursor AFTER the file we've
just read, which just happens to be our date string!  And we're
done.

Quite nifty, I think.

                              * * *

MACRODAT also (sort of) works with WS or NW, but we're really
taking advantage of VDE's 'QUIET' mode for macros here and since
WS4's 'shorthand' feature (nor other key redefiners with any
other WS or NW) has nothing comparable, on these other programs
it's much more sluggish, inelegant and doesn't look really like a
macro like it does with VDE.  Since 95% of my writing is with
VDE, though, it doesn't bother me a bit.

I used to not go to all this 'trouble' -- floating decimal
registers, ZEX scripts, case toggle commands.   I used to use Rob
Friefeld's wonderful ZSDOS-supporting NT42 in a similar way to
write a file consisting of nothing but the date and time.  But
here's what NT42's output looks like:

                      09 Apr 1989  20:45:04

If you're writing a letter to your girlfriend, you don't want to
start it off '09 Apr 1989'.  What's she going to think, that a
computer wrote your letter?  You can erase the '20:45:04' if you
want, but 'Apr' for 'April' just doesn't do.  And let's face it,
we Americans simply will never get used to European format and
that's our prerogative.  Using ZEX and ARUNZ and going through
all that 'trouble,' which, let's face it, for us computer nerds
is no trouble at all, is all the joy in the world.

Have fun with MACRODAT.  You can, of course, excerpt from what I
have described as suits your needs.


Rick Charnes, San Francisco, April 9, 1989
                               |   |    |
                         Works every time...

Human voice: [phone]