xerox 19780814 Recording And Playing Back Selections In Stored Command Sequences free download

File name 19780814_Recording_And_Playing_Back_Selections_In_Stored_Command_Sequences.pdf

XEROX BUSINESS SYSTEMS Systems Development Division August 14, 1978 XEROX SDD A!CII~ I have read and und@ntvtJ~ To: Advanced Design and User Prototypes Group Pages Beviewer~ ______ - ... ----- Date__To --- ._ -==~ # of pages_ _Be:t " If S 41>- /6t c: Larry Clark From: Dave Smith, Bob Shur / SD at Palo Alto Subject: Recording and playing back selections in Stored Command Sequences Filed on: star )macro- selections.bravo This memo addresses some issues concerning the representation of selections in Star's stored command sequences. It deals with Star and the real implementation, not necessarily the Desktop prototype. (How the prototype differs from this theory, if at all, is undecided.) These issues may continue to evolve as we gain more experience with a working system, real or prototype. The following topics are discussed: issues involved in recording selections, the syntactic form of a recorded selection, the identification of Star objects, defining variables, the pattern- matching algorithm for using variables, recordable objects and actions, and playback. Recording selections in Star It is clear that there is 1i ttle difficulty in recording or playing back command operators. We simply record the text on a key cap, e.g. "MOVE", or in a menu, e.g. "CLOSE". On playback, we have a case statement which dispatches on the command string. For operands to commands, however, the situation is more interesting. There are two questions: What is an adequate representation for a selection? How can we generalize the selection representation to include variables? A comparison with Bravo illustrates these questions. Bravo has very few objects, mainly windows and characters. Star, on the other hand, has many kinds of objects (printers, file drawers, mail boxes, calculators, ...), many kinds of text containers (documents, fields, text scrolls), and many kinds of primitive objects (characters, frames, graphic symbols, tables, ...). Star actions can de