Yea because:

And

Are the same thing, AMIRITE?

I share your aversion to TWX.

I think it is a matter of personal taste as much as anything else. I dislike REXX also, but nowhere near as much; I have written REXX scripts for corpies.

Qmodem is great, I used write in that for the original Boo! inc (reactive attack scripts, eek); my favorite, however, is SALT. It compiles, is very similar to C, and extremely versatile. Better at string manipulation and file I/O than any of the others, supports DDE. Free too.

I liked Qmodem Pro fairly well, it was my initial introduction to scripting. It allowed you to record a script and use it, so for a while that's what i did. But looking at the scripting manual for it and studying the code of the scripting language allowed me to learn how to mod the recorded scripts when necessary. That allowed me to work my way into using commands and such.

But if I remember correctly, I was unable to do string manipulation through code - to do stuff like replace a sector number or player name with a variable or whatever. So I jumped over to TWX when it came out. I got TWX Proxy back in the day when you paid for it, and considered it a bargain.

Qmodem Pro seemed fast and if I could have just figured out string manipulation, I probably would have stuck with Qmodem Pro, I had bought a copy of it. I downloaded a copy and looked at it recently, doesn't look right in Win 7 64 bit either, a little box for the display from server and you can't re-size it.

I never used SALT, I don't know of a free telnet app that uses it, maybe you could point me towards one Kav? I looked up Telix but on their website (unless they just haven't updated it, the last entry was like 01 or something) they are still trying to sell it and support it. Or is Telix free now?

Tera Term seems like a good terminal program with a scripting language that you can do string manipulation on, but the work is all done by character position so to my non-programmer eye it seems to me this could cause problems for manipulating lines where the target data you want might be in a different position in the string each time. I didn't see anything equivalent to getText or cutText that you could use.

Edit : Sorry if we hijacked your thread kind of off onto a tangent Mongoose, seems like it happens here sometimes. Someone says something you find interesting and you just have to reply. lol

Telix is the SALT terminal program. Abandonware for > a dozen years. PM'd you the zipfiles, never works for me, will try attaching them here. Think it worked, they are supposed to be floppies just ignore that part.

Q screen can be sized to whatever you please, cant remember how, will try playing with it tomorrow.

The zipfiles are too big for here. Google and yahoo won't allow me to email them as there are executable files in them, do you have an ftp site where I could drop them?

I cant post the decompiler here, same reason.

EDIT: Telix is here: http://www.sac.sk/files.php?d=3&p=58

The files needed are tfw115d1.zip and tfw115d2.zip. It says it is free for 45 days, when deltacom abandoned it they had the grace to set it so the counter stopped at 1 or 2 days left. They are supposed to be floppies, just ignore the sequence of instructions, unzip both, allow 2nd to overwrite all if prompted, run the install.

The decompiler is resalt.exe but I can no longer find it or a zip anymore.

You mentioned in your post that you found it difficult to learn string handling in Q. It is not good at string manipulation, not surprized that you had trouble. SALT, on the other hand, is excellent.

No worries. Interesting convo. And I definitely prefer tangents over strict topic moderation.

Obviously, people have differing viewpoints about what constitutes a user-friendly programming language. The SWATH vs. TWX debate seems to always come down to the relative ease of doing simple things vs. the relative ease of doing complex things. I'm writing my helper to do very complex things that I found difficult or impossible to do even in SWATH. I intend it to be a master scripter's ultimate weapon, and I'm not going to compromise that by dumbing it down in any way. But I am going to hang a ladder for anyone who wants to climb up.

I share in the crime; thank you for your consideration.

you guys should get a room