Ensuring You Edit with the Right Quad
January 30, 2014
HP 3000 editors may be passe in many homesteading sites. Better tools for manipulating and tracking code are available on Linux, Unix, PC and Mac systems. But not many of them have the advantage of grabbing onto an MPE module during development. Robelle's Qedit has moved to PCs, but a 3000-native tool remains the free Quad.
You just have to be sure you're using the right version of this tool.
Walter Murray, who served in HP's Langauge Labs for many years, still likes using the MPE-centric Quad. He explained why, and noted an annoyance, too. One that another MPE veteran helped work around. Said Murray, "For editing, Quad has become my editor of choice. Among its bothersome limitations are that the search is case-sensitive (which leads us to avoid lower case in COBOL source code, except for comments)."
Alan Yeo of ScreenJet has pointed out that the version of Quad being used makes a significant difference. "All Quads are not equal," he said. (Quad can be downloaded from a link off the 3k Associates archival website, a terrific resource for MPE software.)
Whilst that case-sensitivity may be true of the HP version of Quad, it’s not true of other versions (of which there seem to be many).
For example, the HP version for LIST:
The List command lists a range of lines.
The format is
List Range [Offline] [Header] [Unnumbered] [Truncate]
Meanwhile, a Quest/SRN version has CASE NONLIT and WILDCARD options on LIST, FIND, CHANGE
The List command lists a range of lines.
The format is
List Range [Offline] [Header] [Unnumbered] [Truncate]
[Case] [Nonlit] [Wild]
So the Quest version given :L A I"mpe" will by default list any line containing the string in any case combination unless CASE is specified -- whereas the HP version can only show lines containing the exact match.
It is therefore wise to check what version of Quad you are using especially when logging on to a different HP 3000 than you do normally.