Nice to see the emphasis on the advantages of "plain text". Nearly all my important computing is just "plain text", including the 100,000 lines of typing of .NET code, that appears to run as intended, for my startup's Web site.
For calendars, right, that's important data. Sooooo, I wrote some software that is correct back to Pope Gregory. E.g., can read Gone with the Wind, look up the date of the firing on Fort Sumter, and then know the day of the big BBQ!
But my plain text calendar program just prints out for any given year, for each month, a traditional calendar format, e.g.,
Right, there is a lot more we
want to do with calendars!
Sooo, I wrote code in Fortran, Rexx, and Kexx (macro language for "plain text" text editor KEDIT, by far my
most important computing tool) that, given one of either (a) month, day, year or (b) number of days since the start of the Gregorian calendar, will return the corresponding other. So, easy to calculate number of days between two dates, day of week, etc.
Then can easily write other little programs to do a wide range of applications of manipulations of calendar data!!
So, there's another theme: End users get some general purpose tools, e.g., subroutines that do the hard work, and with those tools write short programs that give them what they want, likely all in easy to work with plain text.
For calendars, right, that's important data. Sooooo, I wrote some software that is correct back to Pope Gregory. E.g., can read Gone with the Wind, look up the date of the firing on Fort Sumter, and then know the day of the big BBQ!
But my plain text calendar program just prints out for any given year, for each month, a traditional calendar format, e.g.,
Right, for the movie: Right, there is a lot more we want to do with calendars!Sooo, I wrote code in Fortran, Rexx, and Kexx (macro language for "plain text" text editor KEDIT, by far my most important computing tool) that, given one of either (a) month, day, year or (b) number of days since the start of the Gregorian calendar, will return the corresponding other. So, easy to calculate number of days between two dates, day of week, etc.
Then can easily write other little programs to do a wide range of applications of manipulations of calendar data!!
So, there's another theme: End users get some general purpose tools, e.g., subroutines that do the hard work, and with those tools write short programs that give them what they want, likely all in easy to work with plain text.