Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: THE STORM
From: sheppard_r@kosmos.wcc.govt.nz
Date: 13 Nov 1992 10:57:56 GMT
Reply-To: sheppard_r@kosmos.wcc.govt.nz
Organization: Wellington City Council (Public Access), Wgtn, Nz
NNTP-Posting-Host: kosmos.wcc.govt.nz

Well I thought that you chaps would like to read a few notes that I have got
back from Alan Page on GEnie, the Flash 1.6 man and also the author
of the NEW STORM....


To:     R.SHEPPARD5                     Roger Sheppard

Sub: Flash and STORM

Reply:  Item #1347885 from R.SHEPPARD5  on 92/11/08 at 02:34

  Sorry, no wildcard (don't care) characters. However Storm has a lot of
features to handle automating logons. You can wait for multiple strings
simultaneously. The PROMPT$(n) functions returns a string containing
up to 'n' characters in front of the current cursor location. SCREEN$(n)
returns an entire line of text from the terminal screen. 'n' chooses
which line to return. Trailing spaces are stripped out, so a blank line
returns an empty string.
  The terminal is designed to NEVER miss a character while you are waiting
for a string. Flash could sometimes miss a character, especially at
high speeds. Flash II has a poorly designed WAIT command. Try waiting
for "ALALAN" in Flash II. It can't find it! It gets confused by strings
that have the beginning of the string repeated.
   I used a text editor to count the occurences of the word "THE" in a
large text file. I then sent it computer-to-computer at 9600 baud and
used Storm to wait for and count "THE"'s. It did the job correctly and
did not noticably slow down terminal operation. That's because the
WAIT function is table-driven and has critical portions coded in
assembly code.
 Storm is loaded with string functions, including UCASE$, LCASE$, LTRIM$,
RTRIM$, INSTR, MID$ statement and function, LEFT$, RIGHT$, and several
more. Using SCREEN$ to read text of the terminal screen means it will be
able to do things like select items off screen menus for you, even when
the menus change. e.g. search news items for all menu items containing
a particular topic.
  - Alan

  Item    1054944                 92/11/11        19:22

From:   A.PAGE3                         Alan L. Page

To:     R.SHEPPARD5                     Roger Sheppard

Sub: Flash and STORM

Reply:  Item #1412769 from R.SHEPPARD5  on 92/11/09 at 05:18

 I am just finishing up VT100/VT102 terminal emulation, including character
sets with graphics, bold, underline, blink, etc. 132 column will probably
require scrolling around the window, unless you have a large screen
monitor. Terminal emulations are loadable/unloadable modules, which makes
releasing updates easier. Also, I plan to release source code for the
VT100/VT102 module, so that people can customize it. I do not have
specs on the VT2XX/VT3XX stuff, though it is quite possible that some
talented person out there could update my code to add the necessary
support.
  File transfers are also loadable/unloadable. At the moment they include
CompuServe BPlus, XYmodem and Zmodem. I have not decided whether or not
to release that source code. The file transfers work in the background,
allowing you to do other stuff while a file transfer is in progress,
though at 19200 baud, there may not be a lot of CPU time left over.
 - Alan



Roger..................               sheppard_r@kosmos.wcc.govt.nz