Month
Month
Leader: Bruce Arnold (b a r n o l d @ b l a s t . n e t)
Summary by: Ron Murawski (the_murs@pipeline.com)
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User Group News
C/C++ User Group
The November C/C++ meeting occurred, as always, on the third Tuesday of the month. It began with a demonstration of a program that looked like the old XTree Gold. XTree was an extremely popular DOS file manager. The program in question is a piece of shareware called ZTreeWin. Its resemblance to the old XTree file manager is not coincidental. It is a Win 95 32-bit text-mode app that clones the XTree interface and functionality almost perfectly. If you used and liked XTree in DOS, using ZTreeWin will be like going back home. ZTree supports long file names and never runs out of memory when logging onto large hard drives. See [http://www.ztree.com/] for more information.
Random Access, an all-comments-welcome section followed. A question was asked regarding how physical devices get assigned logical drive letters. There was a discussion of the renaming of the *.W40/*.dos files depending on what mode Win 95 is running in. There was also a long discussion of whether a running Windows C program can call a DOS program. Although compiler help files were surprisingly non-commital regarding this point, the consensus agreed this was possible to do.
Bruce Arnold then moved on to the main presentation, a C program of his called TXT2WP. It converts a DOS text file with "hard" carriage returns into word processor format. The program is implemented as a finite state machine (This technique was discussed and used in the September '97 meeting).
The program removes carriage return - linefeed characters from within paragraphs, removes leading and trailing spaces and converts tabs to spaces. The finite state machine approach simplified the program so each type of conversion is handled by a separate function. Some fine points of character handling were also presented. The program can be downloaded.
See SOURCE CODE links below.