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* Forwarded by Paul Edwards (3:711/934)
* Area : PUBLIC_DOMAIN (PUBLIC_DOMAIN)
* From : Rod Speed, 3:711/934.2 (Friday April 15 1994 22:00)
* To   : Bob Lawrence
* Subj : 20:21
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BL> I've got the Telemate script tagged, now. the PUT command is
BL> pretty-much the same as PRINT, and bloody Telemate doesn't want to
BL> know about hex or anything but ordinary numbers and ascii code.

Its important to keep clearly in mind that hex is just another way of
expressing a number. Sure, its a nuisance to have to convert between
hex and decimal, but thats all it is, just a nuisance, it doesnt affect
what the code can actually do at all.

BL> I've got the Devil Dialler working now, but to send the number 666 I
BL> have to convert it to hex (9a02) and then into ascii Alt142, Alt02
BL> (ˇ.

Sure, that works fine.

BL> Telemate then sends the ˇquite happily and Paul's BBS responds.
BL> It's a bloody nuisance.

Yeah, its a pity you have to.

BL> It's funny, I was going to swap to Telix and dump Telemate, but now
BL> I've got freqing working with Telemate, I might convert TinyPoint
BL> too. It's not a bad way to learn SALT code, converting it to a
BL> different language. How much like C is SALT?

Very. There are some subtle differences in the very fancy stuff that you
can do in C like pointers, but the general style is very similar.

BL> It doesn't seem difficult enough; the way people go on about C.

Have a look at the code in PQWK, you will see there some stuff which
many people like you coming from programming in other than C do find a
bit of a challenge. C allows some very dense and rather cryptic code
which some people find gives them brain fade real quick |-)

Here are a couple of fragments

    if(*(p - 1) != '\r' && p > *hold) {
      *p = '\r';
      p[1] = 0;

The use of the * stuff will throw you for sure. And it gets quite a bit
worse than that too.

This one is stripping trailing spaces from a string

    while(*pp == ' ' && pp > line) {    /* Rstrip returned string */
        *pp = 0;
                --pp;
        }

Part of the secret is to remember that you dont have to write code like
that yourself even if you are writing in C. Tho once you get the hang of
it you find the more long winded style that you are forced to use with
other more primitive languages irks you real quick if you are into a
powerful succinct language like C.

-+- PQWK200
 + Origin: afswlw rjfilepwq (3:711/934.2)
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Hello Rod!

A message with a numeric subject, created with PQWK200.  BFN.

Paul

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