I recently retired from a large Fortune 500 company after 31 years of
designing and writing in-house software. The last 3 years was spent
trying to work with a very large and complex purchased system. It is
obvious that many of the folks who are requesting or demanding that this
particular BUG be fixed have never had to deal with a turn-key package
that has a very low level, if any at all, of support for what they sold
you. I agree with you, Tree. This is NOT a bug, it's the way it works,
by design. I think Tree goes the extra third or fourth mile to maintain
and improve what is a pretty darned good piece of work. Were it not for
his attitude, most of us would be very happy to use version 4.xx and
think it was the best thing since sliced bread.
As an example of how good your support is, I sent a suggestion to the
author of a logging program I use for a logbook that would have improved
the interface with TRLog immensely and would have been relatively easy
to implement. This was not a *request* or a *demand*, but just an idea.
That was 4 months ago and I have not yet received even an
acknowledgement of my e-mail. I guess I'm saying, "let's be thankful for
what we have and give the programmer a break." What is requested can be
done, but at what cost? And...we do have a responsibility to copy the
exchange in a contest or at least that's the way I interpret most of the
rules, regardless of what "the computer" says.
In defense of not making the change, let me say that non-delimited
character strings are extremely difficult to work with, requiring lots
of lines of code and, consequently, more computer resouces. Writing
those extra lines of code is *not* a trivial task, especially for
someone who has a regular day job and a family.
If a change can be made, great. In the meantime, I will continue to copy
the exchange as sent and adjust the input as needed. The computer is
only a tool and it's a poor workman who blames his tools. Hang in there,
RAT-Bert, this pointy-haired boss cares. Keep up the good work. In the
immortal words of that Ratherly guy, "Courage".
73,
Jim, N4IR
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