Olaf Cichewicz wrote:
"duh, I think your suggestion points into another possible direction -> OOP. (if you look at your structures as classes)"

Precisely! OOP is nothing but datastructure programming with silly nomenclature added. When I started reading OOP years later, I immediately realized it was nothing new.

Regarding the interpretive language, its a way of rolling up repetitive code into one section as you traverse the datastructure (pages).

In its simplest form, you are mapping a menu or operation selection to a subroutine address. If you reduce your modules carefully, you can probably write one nice datastructure traversal routine and use the sentinal characters in a page's structure to list its unique combination of actions (each action sentinal uses one subroutine).

In the project I refered to previously, the man machine interface included a computer monitor that allowed them to select tasks or parameters by sliding through a on screen menu. I included several keys to allow the to do any function. For example, they could use arrow keys to hop between displayed choices or right/left arrows to drill down or up in menus. They could ALSO use highlighted alpha characters or numeric entry numbers to jump directly to a line. I think you'd describe it to something like what ZCPR3 was capable of doing.

The structure allowed me to input a variable length text descriptor (because the customer always wanted to change those around) and the set of keys to select it, the links to drill down and drill up pages, and next and previous pages for the arrow navigation.

Its was a great improvement for the system we did for the Air Force (5 years before I joined the company) whose interface was more like MON51 than anything else. I through out the previous electronics and code and only kept the machine processing circuitry.

I do recall one interesting thing while working on the brand new model Wyse 50 (long ago)... I discovered a key sequence that allowed me to display terminal memory map, the walk through it with cursor commands until I blew it up. The screen Flashed and disappeared and only a cold start could restore it. :)

I have a gift for finding such things.

duh