> > For me, the silly thing in past years was that you could buy programs like > > QPAC2 or QD which happened to include Pointer Environment but AFAIK you > > could > > never buy Pointer Environment by itself! > > > > Hmmmm! I now wonder what I bought from Jochen when he sent me QPTR. I thought > that was the Pointer Environment by itself. What I got was the QPTR Manual > (now much used), a set of Qmac macros for programming assembler pointer > programs > using Qmac, QPTR extensions for programming Pointer Environment in SuperBASIC > and some demo SuperBASIC programs. Packages like QPAC2, QPAC1, QPTR, Easyptr etc etc always came with pointer environment included on the disk.
This blurred in users' minds the distinctions between all the terms. QPTR was the programming reference guide book and the associated files on the disk which came with it. This happened to include pointer environment. What I'm getting at was that the terms QPTR and Pointer Environmetn are often used synonymously by programmers and users, but in fact are not quite the same thing. Technically, QPTR is the user programming guide and software, whereas pointer environment itself is the extended console driver, on screen pointer, saving and restoring windows on the screen. Although we usually know what everyone means, the terminology does occasionally get confused making it harder to work out what a user means by a problem running my program with QPTR or QPAC2. "My program won't work with QPAC2" results in the question "Does it work with just pointer environment". "No it doesn't that's what I just said." "But they're not the same thing..." "What do you mean, I thought they were?!?!" and so it goes on. Dilwyn Jones _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
