Scor­pio News

that itself asked ‘W/w’, and which on exit asked:
“BACKUP DONE – PROCEED (with original command)?".

I have now completely changed the system of command access. The philosophy now is that any command that can cause a disk operation, cursor movement, printer output or change the printer or screen format is protected in some way.

All lower case (a-z) commands, except “f”, are converted to upper case, allowing great shortening of the dispatch table code. Protection is applied to ALL A-Z commands EXCEPT I,​J,​M,​D,​F,​f,​V. (M,​D,​F,​f require parameters anyway, so they can be aborted, and I,​J and V commands do not cause serious problems if invoked in error.)

The remaining A-Z commands can have unwanted results if accessed in error, so they are ALL accessed via a lead-in key. I have chosen ‘^Q’ for this purpose, since it was not used as a command, and ‘Q’ is near the control key. A small amount of extra code has been added which has widened the scope of this, so that a total of four key sequences are available to access the required protected commands. e.g.;

^QE or ^Qe or ^Q^E or ^Q^e keys will ALL access the ‘E’ command.

Where the command in question can have particularly awkward results, such as ‘E’, ‘W’, ‘K’ etc.;, a further prompt is printed for security. Since most of these extra security keys are only used a few times in a session, this double protection is not a problem.

In some cases like formatting, the ^Q protected command requests extra parameters, and so this request provides a way of escape, without the need for GEMPEN to ask if it is safe to proceed.

Modifications to Commands.

a) F/f – Find and Replace

1. ^X during string input will abort command without cursor moving. Originally once a string was started there was no way to abort, and ^Z would cause the cursor to move to some other place which depended on what had been entered.
2. Find and Replacement Strings now allow ? wildcard Characters. (Advisable not to use ?’s in replacement string since they will be left in the text.)