Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!garfield!john13
From: john13@garfield.MUN.EDU (John Russell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Devices in general
Keywords: devices speak 1.3 1.4
Message-ID: <5015@garfield.MUN.EDU>
Date: 28 Nov 88 23:35:52 GMT
Organization: CS Dept., Memorial U. of Newfoundland, St. John's
Lines: 33

Just as an addendum to my earlier posting re: the speak device losing the
last character in most write requests, there's also strangeness involving
punctuation; I haven't been able to make speak: recognize punctuation marks
for inflection unless the mark is immediately followed by a "pronounceable"
character, ie. not another punctuation mark or whitespace. This seems to
be related, as if the very last character of each sentence is being dis-
regarded.

I am still very interested in seeing what sort of devices could be
constructed and integrated into the general environment. 14 (the number
assign shows as being mounted now) is only a start :-).

One which comes immediately to mind is a spooling daemon, spool:. Although
I know of a number of spooling programs and facilities, the ones I've seen
all require you to either know the filenames in advance, or go through
extensive physical interaction to print new files. A spool device would
allow this process to be automated, and remove the need to wait for
DPaint to finish printing before sending that Pagesetter document. The
device would simply need to stash the data in memory, wait for the printer
to become free, then take control and send the next available job.

Another which appeals to me is a Tek emulation device, which might be opened
with a filename that specified the size, colours, scaling etc. for the
drawing screen. This would allow any terminal program to become a Tektronix
emulator, as long as it had the ability to do an ASCII capture. This sort
of device would lend itself to more built-in intelligence, perhaps featuring
the ability to pan, zoom, and dump data to disk based on requests passed
to it.

John
-- 
"Media is Ignorent, Researchers Say"
		-- either this is an incredibly sarcastic headline-writer, or...