Dilwyn and I used to call it "Difficult Pointer" all those years ago
simply because it seemed to be "not easy" in the slightest. Once when I
had a week off work for a holiday, I sat down with EP2 and just hammered
away at it trying to find out how I could get it to do things. The
tutorial series in Quanta was the result. :-)
I remember poor Albin Hessler trying to demonstrate Easyptr to me at a
meeting in Germany at some point (Munster?). I was still not much the wiser.
Actually, it wasn't so much "Easyptr" which was difficult, rather the
baseline QPTR programming principles and terminology and the like.
Had it not been for that Easyptr tutorial (which is still worth reading if
you are using Easyptr for the first time) I would not have got into Easyptr
at all, or at least it would have taken longer. Your tutorial put the EASY
into Easyptr.
Then, I had to try and make it work with QLIBerator as well. Couldn't
get it to work until I finally figured out the meaning of the bit in the
QLIBerator manual about adding something like '/0' at the end of a list
of parameters. After that, easy peasy!
Yes, it couldn't handle missing last parameters - where the list of
parameters ends with a separator, so you had to add a dummy parameter. IIRC
it was a QLiberator issue, not an Easyptr one, so programs ran OK under the
interpreter and cuased much gnashing of teeth (to put it politely) when they
didn't work compiled.
Of course, these days, you can choose to write using QPTR, TurboPTR or
EasyPtr. And there's a few packages designed to make some of these easier to
use,like the PE Kit, SPACE and the like.
As you might guess from the fairly consistent appearance of my programs, I
have a set of modules I bolt together to form the core of most of my
programs. Saves having to reinvent the wheel each time.
--
Dilwyn Jones
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