Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!apple!bionet!agate!pasteur!ames!lll-tis!lll-winken!ubvax!ardent!rap
From: rap@ardent.UUCP (Rob Peck)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Products supporting ARexx
Message-ID: <615@ardent.UUCP>
Date: 27 Sep 88 18:08:22 GMT
References: <12771@cisunx.UUCP>
Organization: Dana Computer, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 32

In article <12771@cisunx.UUCP>, ejkst@cisunx.UUCP (Eric J. Kennedy) writes:
> 
> 
> A couple of weeks ago I requested people to send me mail about various
> programs that use ARexx.  As promised, here is a brief summary of these
> 
> SpeechToy       Speech demo            Available, includes source?? (PD??)
> 
Yes, I hacked the speechtoy source to include Arexx support.  The file
is currently available on Compuserve and People Link as "SPTOY.ARC"
and it includes the source.  It is a unidirectional AREXX port, and
includes also the ability to read and write its own icon so as to save
the current settings to use as the default the next time it opens.

Normally, one would expect a command from AREXX to a program such as
SpeechToy to be perhaps a single word, such as SPEAK or TRANSLATE.
To simplify the interface and command parsing, I chose in this case
to pass commands such as SPEAK=1 or TRANSLATE=1.  You may recognize
this as the format for TOOLSTRINGS, in that I am using the Workbench
icon.library toolstring-parser to get my parameters.  You see, I wrote
the read/write-icon functions first, so they were already there.

I tried to specify toolstrings as "SPEAK" but without the "=" sign
and something to follow it, the icon.library parsing function could 
not recognize the command.  I did not pursue this exhaustively, so
I don't know if there is a workaround, but I am satisfied with the
result and am quite unlikely to push source code changes any further.

If there is enough demand, and if Fred Fish does not already have it,
I'll send him a copy.  As with the original code by David Lucas, I
have returned this to the public domain.

Rob Peck