sequence of lines

[David Thompson]

>Back after a few day¹s I see the solution you offered. I am impressed by the
>way you managed to avoid to affect the general memory.
>However, when the memory is in use at the point of introducing in a macro,
>Œnoyes¹ Œgetscrap¹ or other windows that affect he memory, you could handle
>as follows for the same task (m=clipboard(), a=text):
>
>a=m+"€"+a noyes "do you want a sequence of lines now"
>if m="Yes"getscrapok "typ 1rst line dot last line"a=a["€",-1][2,-1]
>selectwithin seq()=>val(m[1,"."])and seq()¾val(m[".",²€²][2,-1])stop
>else m=a[1,²€²][1,-2]a=a["€",-1][2,-1]endif
>If you don¹t want to see the little hesitation as compared to your solution
>with less intern calculations, start with HIDE.
>In stead of € you can use other unique symbols, like "`","^","å","®"

This is essentially a restatement of the way that 
arrays work. The € is your separator character.

It would probably be helpful to know which 
version of Panorama you are using, how long you 
have been using it, and which versions you have 
used in the past. The Panorama II Handbook uses 
the word "Macro" as you do, but all the 
documentation written in the past 12 years, 
covering versions 3.0 and later, has used the 
word "Procedure." This leads me to believe that 
you may be relying on documentation that is more 
than a decade out of date. I don't know if your 
software is similarly out of date.

>
>You can solve many but not all choices offered during a running procedure
>using variables, but I am afraid the (general) memory cannot always be
>spared. Panorama, though it is an excellent programm, alas, has only one
>memory (my calculator has allready 6). Therefore I found it usefull to
>expand the memory by using a little trick with symbols.

You seem to be using the term "general memory" to 
refer to the clipboard. It is true that there is 
only one of these, but it belongs to the computer 
system as a whole, and not to any one 
application. The various applications that are 
running on your machine must share it.

Variables exist to give your procedures as many 
"memories" as they require. A procedure that 
needs 100 memories can declare 100 variables.

The "noyes" and "getscrap" statements are both 
out of date since Panorama 3.0. They still exist 
in later versions of Panorama, because procedures 
that were written with earlier versions need to 
continue to work, but their use is discouraged, 
because they affect the clipboard. There are 
alternatives that don't affect it. My previous 
email on this thread used Alert 1014 (or 
AlertNoYes) in place of NoYes, and it used 
GetText in place of GetScrap

>There remains a question, however. Since I write a bit complicated financial
>programms using panorama, during the running of these one is frequently
>asked to make a choice, I am always looking for a shorter macro-text. It
>should be very usefull if the word clipboard() could be changed in only the
>lettre m, which is equally understandable. Might there be a possibility -
>with a feature I could not detect and possibly missed - to have this
>changement realised?
>Other abbreviations might be ³down, up, first or last² i.s.o. adding
>Œrecord¹

Beginning with Panorama V, you can write custom 
statements and functions. You could create a 
custom m() function that would be the same as 
clipboard(). The () are necessary for Panorama to 
recognize it as a function, and not a field or 
variable. You could write a custom statement 
called DOWN that would do a DownRecord, and one 
called UP that would do an UpRecord, and so on. 
The ALERTNOYES statement I mentioned a little 
earlier is a custom statement that comes with 
Panorama. Writing something like

AlertNoYes "Do you want to continue?"

would be the same as writing

Alert 1014, "Do you want to continue?"

In either case, you would use 
info("DialogTrigger") to find out which choice 
was made, instead of clipboard(), because the 
clipboard would remain unchanged. If you wanted 
to make a dlgtgr() custom function to use in 
place of
info("DialogTrigger"), you could do that too. 
When a custom statement is named, its name is in 
UPPER CASE LETTERS, but when it is used in a 
procedure, you can use aNy COMbinATION oF UpPer 
and lowER CASE that you like.

Dave