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[VAX82A.SAO]AAAREADME.TXT
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.c;SAO Contributions
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.c;coordinated by
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.c;Roger Hauck
.c;Smithsonian Institution
.c;Astrophysical Observatory (SAO)
.c;Cambridge, MA 02138
.c;(617)495-7151 or (FTS)830-7151
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This submission contains the latest versions of the RED screen editor,
STOIC (Stack-Oriented Interactive Compiler), a variant of FORTH,
and RDPAR, a set of input routines for use in place of FORTRAN formatted
input.
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.le;RED
 is a screen editor for use with VT100's.
Considerable effort has been made to have RED operate efficiently
in a heavy interactive environment.
It's syntax is similar to TECO's.
People familiar with the Data General editors SPEED and NSPEED
will feel at home with this editor.
Current users of RED will find many new features,
including CUT-PASTE and user-written macros.
I expect to support other terminals and make more efficiency improvements
within the next half-year.
RED is written in STOIC.
.le;STOIC
 is a variant of FORTH.
Significant differences from FORTH are integration of
VMS IO and System Services rather than using the FORTH disk structure,
compilation of machine code (both inline and subroutine calls)
as opposed to threaded code for higher
efficiency.
Double-precision floating point operations and a floating-point
stack have been added with this release.
.le;RDPAR
 is a set of input routines for use in place of FORTRAN formatted
input.
It can be used with any other language supplied by DEC, but
the documentation was written with FORTRAN in mind.
With RDPAR, all input is handled through a "parameter file".
This is just
an ordinary text file, containing the data you want to pass to your program.
But the order in which data appears in a parameter file is not important.
Rather than using position to identify data, RDPAR uses a "parameter name":
a string which appears at the start of each line.
A call to RDPAR within a
program specifies a parameter name, and RDPAR searches through the file
for it.
For each parameter name, you can specify that the (interactive) user should
be prompted for the data, or that the data should come from the DCL command
line used to run the program.
These and other features are handled entirely
within the parameter file; no recompilation of the program is necessary.
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