ftp.cs.arizona.edu/ftp.cs.arizona.edu.tar/ftp.cs.arizona.edu/icon/newsgrp/group95c.txt/000002_icon-group-sender _Tue Sep 19 20:22:13 1995.msg

Internet Message Format | 1996-01-03 | 6KB

Received: by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Wed, 20 Sep 1995 09:17:47 MST
To: [e-mail]
Date: 19 Sep 1995 20:22:13 GMT
From: [e-mail] (Alan D Corre)
Message-Id: <43n8pl$[e-mail]>
Organization: Information & Media Technologies, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
Sender: [e-mail]
Subject: ProIcon
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I recently completed a program written in ProIcon for the Macintosh
computer to help students study foreign language texts. I said: "John,
let's transfer this to your machine, so that you can put it on the
system for the kids to try out." Now in that program there was a line:

    filename := getfile("Text to study? ",,"Greek_Texts")

which looks into a folder containing the various texts available and
allows the user to choose a text for study. For some reason, when the
program was transferred, instead of displaying the names of the texts,
it accessed a folder higher up, revealing, like the Calvin Klein ads,
things that students are not supposed to think about, let alone
actually see. Of course, this is no problem for a seasoned Mac user. A
few shakes of the mouse's tail, and you can navigate to the folder you
need. But this can be confusing for untutored students, and is, in any
case, inelegant. I said: "That's funny. That wasn't happening on my
machine."  John said: "That's because you have a slightly older version
of the system software. I just installed the upgrade, and those things
don't work the way they used to. It has happened to all my programs
too." (He does not use Icon.) Hallelujah. Apple, as usual, "improves"
its software and causes you all kinds of agony. I am always amused when
computer companies talk about "enhancement" of their software, which is
an euphemistic way of saying that they have taken bugs out of their
software, put in new ones, and are charging you $89 for the privilege. I
said: "What do you suggest I do?" He said: "I have had to build my own
lists, and you can probably do the same." So I went back to the drawing
board at this eleventh hour and wrote:

    fnm := gettext("Enter name of text: " || filegen(1),"","","")
             ..........
    procedure filegen(n)
    local fold,fnm,str
    #initialize str to zero length string
             str := ""
    #treat digits as chars to avoid possible system intervention
      if n == "1" then fold := "Greek_Texts" else
      if n == "2" then fold := "Hebrew_Texts" else
      if n == "3" then fold := "Other_Texts" else stop("Problem in filegen")
    #generate and catenate filenames
      every fnm := file(fold) do
        str ||:= (fnm || "; ")
    #remove last semicolon and space
      str[0:-2] := ""
    return str
    end #filegen

This corrected the problem, but causes extra work for the unfortunate
students, who are harried enough already. A while ago I expressed on this
newsgroup some unhappiness with the Apple system, which evoked a huffy
letter from Apple. But I suppose the fact is that as things get more
complicated, it is difficult to check out every side effect of what you
change.

A reminiscence. Around 1980 I was traveling in Belgium and saw a book on
Ap-L-Isp in French on a station newsagent's stall. I had been using this
Lisp on the Apple II+, so I bought the book, and found it quite
informative. I rather liked Ap-L-Isp. Of course, it had some
limitations. For example, it was limited to upper case letters, but as a
Hebraist I appreciated that. (Hebrew has only upper case letters. Or
mebbe it has only lower case letters. Who knows?) I think the human race
lost an opportunity to dump our silly habit of capitalizing when
computers came in, but we muffed it. english, french and german All have
different capitalization rules, and all of them serve only to torture
school children. But that is neither here nor there. When the Apple IIE
came in, Apple claimed that it would run II+ software. But I want to
tell you that Ap-L-Isp went looking for its cars in the wrong garage,
and was dead in the water. You couldn't get it to work at all on the
IIE. I'm glad I am a hebraist (or is it Hebraist) rather than a computer
scientist.  The Hebrew Bible has been around for thousands of years, and
that nice book on Lisp did not last even a thousand days.

Another thing about the IIE. If I had had the ability of Keats, I would
have written a poem entitled: "On First Looking into Ken Bowles' Apple
Pascal."
...Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims
into his ken...
I had been using Pascal on the Univac 1100, and the speed and ease of
Apple Pascal was unbelievable. No more typing in IBM cards to correct a
little error! Apple Pascal came in four 5.25 disks, and you could run it
with one or two disk drives. When the IIE came along, Apple Pascal
worked fine with two disk drives, but would not work properly with one
any more! Apparently it did not occur to them that anyone was still
using one disk drive. Well, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is no
Yale University (in funding, I mean. Not sure that the education is all
that different.) And there was not enough money to buy that extra disk
drive at UWM. So...

The French have a saying: "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose."
"The more it changes, the more it's the same thing." Don't apply to
operating systems. Plus ca change, plus c'est un pain dans le neck.


--
            Alan D. Corre
            Emeritus Professor of Hebrew Studies
            University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee