David Wakeling writes |Yes, Certainly. Here at York we have a small electrical hoist in one of the |Departmental stairwells which is used for lifting expensive and delicate |equipment onto the upper floor of the building. As part of an experiment in |real time functional programming, I wrote a Haskell program to control this |hoist. It proved to be a tricky exercise: the hoist is controlled by a number |of registers, and reading and writing these registers in the correct order |with the correct values proved to be a royal pain. Indeed, . . . When someone in the UK uses a phrase like this, I'm never sure whether the usage is literal or figurative. Tell me , Dave, is this because your lift project has some connection with H.M. royal shaft I heard about a couple of years ago? (It seems to me the phrase was used in connection with the proposed poll tax---I mean "Community Charge"---but I never was able to work out what this had to do with lifts.) --Joe
