It’s been a few months since the last QHJ, but I’ve been busy working on a few projects and doing some traveling.
In early June I traveled to Newport, Rhode Island to attend the “Miracle in Newport 93” QL show. There I was able to meet some QL’ers that I have not met before, plus renew acquaintances with those that I have met but not seen in a while. Attendance was fairly good. I was pleased to see that three vendors from the UK were able to make it. Stuart Honeyball of Miracle, Tony Firshman of T.F. Services, and Bill Richardson (can’t remember what company he owned) provided a few new Sinclair stories for all to enjoy.
The hit of the show was the new QXL card. I must admit that I did not take a close look at it, knowing that my pocket book was not ready for it (plus I don’t have a PC to run it on). Some people were hesitant to buy, knowing that it is so new and not quite ready ( I believe the Basic is still being worked on). But, there was one buyer who braved the waters and bought a full QXL (it can handle 8 Meg of memory, but comes with various amounts of memory, so you can buy memory on the local market).
The most entertaining story was the one Bill Richardson told about Sir Clive. About a year and a half ago, Bill ran across Sir Clive, whom he had known for some time. Sir Clive asked Bill what he was doing, and Bill mentioned that he was selling hardware and software for Sir Clive’s computers. “You mean the Z88”, said Sir Clive. “No, the QL”, replied Bill. Sir Clive’s answer was “The what?” It seems Sir Clive had forgotten all about the QL.
While on the subject of Sir Clive, I happened to see a .sig file from a Sinclair fan (can’t remember who it was) that said “If only Clive Sinclair was Bill Gates, and vice versa”. Kind of makes you think.
Now to another subject, I am working on a QL Freeware list. I know that there is an Freeware Exchange (IFE), but I am trying to compile a list of the more major QL freeware packages, like MicroEmacs, C68, GNU Awk, Yacc, QeM, and so on. Full packages, not just a short utility. Believe me, nothing I write will probably show up on the list. I plan to upload a draft version to Garbo. I hope others will download it and provide me with comments, additions, and changes.
In the April 1993 edition of “The C Users Journal”, there is an article covering natural language processing. The accompanying source code was plain C so I thought I would get it to run on the QL. I got a hold of the code and compiled it with C68. It compiled just fine (no errors or warnings). Then the test, to see if it will run. It seemed to work fine, except that it always returned “I don’t know” to all the questions I asked it. I used the examples from the book and still no luck.
As a control test, I compiled the code under MS-DOS with Mix Power C and everything worked fine. The examples in the book gave the proper answer.
Now for some debugging. I put some print statements in the QL version to see where things might be going awry. After a while I noticed that the program was not looking at a file on disk as it should. I did not know if this was because of a buffer or an error with C68.
Not having the expertise in C (or the time), I would like to throw the gauntlet to anyone out there. I can e-mail someone the source code or put it on disk. To further peak someone’s interest, there was a follow on article in the June issue expanding the language processor (adding tense). I hope some C expert out there will take the time to port this program over to the QL.