The
next meeting is on Monday 17th May @ 8pm. Following a democratic decision made on the coollist during the week, it is hoped to persuade one of our experts to give a
short talk/demo on the mysteries of setting up a website.
| ELECTRONIC
NEWSLETTER |
With so many of our
members on
the web we've decided to go for electronic delivery this month, and
broadcast it
via the Coollist. We hope to make the transition as painless as
possible for
everyone. We've chosen do it this time as a rich text email. These
some of
the other ways we may try.
Plain Text
Email
Cheap and cheerful, no graphics
fonts,
pictures.
HTML
Attachments
The newsletter might be typeset in HTML and sent attached to an
email.
You would read it with your browser.
Please let us know via the cool list what the results
are.
G
|
| DON’T BE A
LURKER |
The Glencom Cool List is
up and
running well. Its great to see more and more of our members are making
use of
it. The most popular topic of conversation on the GCL this past month
has been
IE5. There have also been conversation threads about free ISPs,
air
traffic control and the like.
According to the Jargon File,
the
definition of a lurker is someone who joins a newsgroup, reads
all the
postings, but does not contribute or share his/her knowledge.
A lot
of our
members are still getting to grips with the web. They probably think
that
someone else in the group knows more about a topic than they, and that
their
ideas are not needed. Not so. To keep the group alive everyone needs to
be
heard, we don’t want to have an inner circle doing all the talking
on the Cool
List, whilst everyone else listens. So please don’t be a lurker,
let’s hear from
you.
|
Download
the latest version of ICQ here and communicate instantly with other
Glencom members.
Who is online now?
Allens Pub
|
| CAN'T PROGRAM WON'T
PROGRAM |
in FORTH
No.4
Last time we learned several way to move around,
access and
manipulate numbers on the parameter stack. Now it is time to look at the
return stack.
The Return stack - who
needs
it?
Why do we need another stack when we
have a
perfectly good parameter stack to play with? Sometimes it becomes
hard to
read code that performs complex gymnastics on the stack. The rstack can
reduce
the complexity. The linkage mechanism --during execution-- uses
the
return stack (rstack): the address of the next word to be
invoked,
so that when the current word is done executing, the system knows to
jump to the
next word. (This is the case in almost all Forth implementations. All
have a
return stack, whether or not they use them for linking
subroutines.)
In
addition to serving as a reservoir of return addresses (since words can
be
nested, the return addresses need a stack to be put on) the rstack is
where the
limits of a DO...LOOP loop are placed.
Tread
with care
The user can also store/retrieve
to/from
the rstack. This is an example of using a component for a purpose other
than the
one it was designed for. Such use is discouraged for novices since it
adds the
spice of danger to programming.
Storing and
Retrieving from Rstack
To store to the
rstack write
>R , and to retrieve use R> . The word R@
copies the
top of the rstack to the TOS. Another use of rstack is to hold ,
VARIABLEs - such as intermediate results in a calculation, again
reducing
the gymnastics. Take care however, if you use rstack to hold temporary
variables
you must return it to it's original state when you are finished or for
sure your
program will crash! G |
MORSE
EMAILS
For the several radio amateurs in our group,
I’ve
found just the program for you. It generates high quality morse code at
speeds
of 1 to 100 words per minute using just your PC’s built in MIDI
card. You can download the
program which is called
CWMIDI from:
http://www.myhost.com/rdey/robsmidi.htm
If
you want to put morse code on your website, or send each other morse-emails, this is the way to go. The program is written by American radio amateur Rob L. Dey,
KA2BEO and
is freeware. G
ZIP DRIVE IN THE SKYThinking of buying a Zip
drive?
Hold your fire, Visto are offering a free service on the web to backup
up to
15Mb of files, graphics or whatever. You can download software which
will
synchronize files on your PC with your files on the Visto site. Visit
www.briefcase.com.
GWHAT'S NEW ON
THE
click and see. |
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