Specifications

the old Commodore single-column string-of-spaghetti, a hopeless arrangement for
professional word-processing. While you can pause the directory and call for a
file, you can’t restart and rescroll. You get to call for a directory— from the
top— all over again. WordPro's four-column directories are far superior, for you
can edit them, scroll them, send them to printer, xerox them, and file them on
8.5x11 paper. If you could print 'CLIP directories, you'd have a yard of sphagh-
etti on 8050s and 8250s. (Batteries says Version 9000B will let you load direct
ories as text, which means you can sort, print, and edit— in four columns, we
hope!). Meanwhile, we print 'CLIP directories from WordPro.
2. In 9000A, WordPro's old, quick 3-keystroke 'delete-word, delete-sentence
commands are replaced by a slow, involved process in which you set range on the
phrase and then 'kill* it. It is so slow we gave up and deleted manually. 9000B
is supposed to incorporate a quick 3-keystroke method. It's needed!
3. A serious design deficiency: An HCR (hard carriage return, which shows on
screen as a left-pointing arrow) at the start of a line is not deleted when you
enter text to its right.,(All WP programs we've ever seen do it automatically).
Result: when you file to disk and retrieve that line, it's indented half-a-page.
Since ’CLIP prints HCR's automatically on new, blank lines, you find it easy to
send text to file with an HCR on a line, with disastrous results. This bug must
be fixed; we’re not about to check every indented line for a prefixed HCR.
4. We loathe blinking cursors, and 'CLIP'S cursor is a fast blinker, which
drove us out of the house screaming in half an hour. Some folks like blinkers;
some don't; there ought to be a way to turn that infuriating wink off.
In sum, we can recommend 'CLIP, with the reservations above, since it sells for
about four-tenths of WordPro’s price and is a marvellously versatile WP program.
Barry Bogart strongly recommends it; Jim Strasma’s last words in MIDNIGHT are:
"This is it! This is the one you've waited for...." Barry Bogart adds, "I think
any company interested in supplying the SuperPET market deserves our patronage."
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A SHORT SAI TO SET AND GET We've had a couple of questions from teachers on
TIME AMD DATE IH MICROPASCAL how to get time and date information in program
in mPASCAL, which has no instrinsic functions to
set or get time or date. It's easily done, as demonstrated below by a couple of
short programs written by Marvin Cox of 4900 W. 96th St., Oak Lawn, 111. 60453,
which peek/poke the direct memory locations where time/date are kept in SPET. If
you want more information on settime/gettime, see p. 46 ff, Vol. 1. Those who
need them can easily write independent programs to set or get time or date from
the examples and data below.
program datesetsee_pd(input,output); {enters date and then reads it}
var
ii:integer;
date:char;
begin
writeln(chr(12));
writeIn('Enter 3 characters for month, 2 digits for day, 4 digits for year.');
writeln('Use a space between month entry, day entry, and year entry.');
for ii:=0 to 10 do
begin
read(date); {Date is kept in $0164 thru $0l6e, in 11 consecutive}
SuperPET Gazette, Vol.I No.11 -175- December 1983/January 1984