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C00002 00002 SOME PROGRAMMING TASKS
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SOME PROGRAMMING TASKS
1. Make a practical file cruncher. REM has done a good part of
the work some time ago. Perhaps it needs the syntax
CRUNCH <FILE NAME> ā <LIST OF FILES>
The result is a crunched file and a table of contents. The latter may
be part of the same file or more feasibly a file with the same name
and a different extension. So we get FOO.CRU and FOO.CON.
There needs to be a command that might take the form
UNCRUNCH BLA.F4,BAZ.PUB ā FOO
which extracts BLA.F4 and BAZ.PUB from FOO.CRU. A switch determines
whether FOO.CRU remains as is or has BLF4 etc. deleted from it.
One may want to allow name change in the process of extraction.
It would be best of all if crunched files remained in the directory,
but this would require a change to SKSER.
Qt is assumed that people would be told a ratio between disk
space and computer time and would be encouraged to make their
crunching occur in the middle of the night.
[Note: July 1978. REM has a new approach to file crunching that is
mathematically elegant, but which hasn't been brought to practical
use yet. Moreover, it looks like something rather automatic
is required, since the previous cruncher got hardly any use. We may
need a program that crunches files that have been unused for a while,
leaves them in the directory with a notation that they have been
crunched, and uncrunches them automatically when they are referred to].
A good system might be a suitable Master's project.
2. A minor modification to the DIRECTORY command would cause
it to print file names as <name>.<ext>[<prj>,<prg>] instead of
in the fixed field format it now uses. This would make the xpoint
command in E more useful in moving from directories to the files and
back. This would be a good project for a beginner who wishes to
learn system programming.
3. Write a program to listen as a telephone call is dialed
and distinguish the following:
a. nothing has happened yet
b. busy signal
c. ringing
d. human answered or silence answer
e. computer has answered with tone