Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by chendoh

I DL, and installed 5.2.0.329.1_su, this morning, glad I have DSL, even with that it took 40".

Followed your prompts from post #9, and had my first game of NB just using your code....experimentation awaits!

Congratulations! I believe you are the first hypographer other than me with ready access to a MUMPS interpreter

Now that you have a technological edge over the competition (OK, only Jay-qu and Janus so far – clearly the lack of huge cash prizes is making this a rather low-key competition ), you should pretty quickly be able to trail-and-error your way to a winning solution – though likely not before you begin cursing my crude interface for its lack of a “save/restore” function

A question, can the code be saved or does it have to be entered for each new game?

Yes, it can easily be saved.

XELCOL4 is, in MUMPS terms a “local symbol”, meaning it persists only as long as your job (terminal session). It’s easy to copy it to a persistent, on-disk “global”, by entering something like this (only needs to be done once, unless changes are made to XELCOL4):

m ^SAVENB=XELCOL4

Then, each time you start a new terminal session, you can copy it back to its local symbol with this:

m XELCOL4=^SAVENB

“M” is the abbreviation for the MUMPS command “merge” – you can enter the full keyword “merge” if you like, but most people prefer to use the abbreviations. Note that the only difference between a local and a global is that the latter begins with the special character “^”.

If you want a lot of convenience, you can create a small xecute code program to load and start the game, by entering something like

s ^playNB="m XELCOL4=^SAVENB x XELCOL4"

Then, to load and start the game, you need only enter (note that MUMPS local and global references are case sensitive, so “^playNB” is not the same as “^PlayNB” or “^playnb”):

x ^playNB

The global reference you use to store things is MUMPS is up to you – as long as you don’t use one being used for something else, it’s OK. You can tell if a global (such as “^MYGLOBAL”) exists by entering:

w $d(^MYGLOBAL)

If “0” is displayed, it doesn’t. You can use a single global name to store all things of a certain kind, such as xecute code from hypgraphy, by varying the above code slightly to something like

m ^HYPOX("XELCOL4")=XELCOL4

and

m XELCOL4=^HYPOX("XELCOL4")

I personally use a pretty jazzy little collection of utilities to keep a “library” of useful xecute code programs, which has automatic versioning, and basic shared subroutine loading features. It’s anybody’s for the asking, but I think it might be more than you need unless you begin seriously writing and/or managing xecute code programs.