Bob's DIRECT = find + ls

[Rich Thomson <rthomson@ptc.com>]

One program I will remember as a "great hack" from DELTA days is Bob
Mader's improvements to DIRECT.  Talk about creeping featurism!  Bob's
DIRECT added wildcards for PPNs (previously only wildcards for
filenames within a particular PPN were implemented), searching/sorting
by file size, creation date, last access date.  Probably a bunch of
other switches I can't remember at the moment.  At one point I
remember Bob coming into 203 Willard Hall with a diagram he had made
for controlling the flag variables holding the switch bits.  (Remember
doing FLAGS% AND 128%?)

Bob had written a gigantic boolean expression for analyzing all the
switch bits.  The expression was so huge he hand-made a diagram where
he matched up all the parenthesis in his expression to ensure that it
had the proper semantics.

This diagram was the inspiration for one of Ralph Gonzalez' programs.
(Even if I never understood Ralph's code at the time, he managed to
impress the hell out of me with the results every time!)  Ralph's
program read in your BASIC-PLUS source and generated a printout
(spanning multiple pages as necessary) that drew the parenthesis
matching style of diagram that Bob had done by hand.  I was so
impressed!

If either of you (Bob or Ralph) have listings of these programs, that
would be cool for the "museum" :).
--
					    Rich Thomson
					    rthomson@ptc.com