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Date:	Sun, 3 Dec 2006 08:07:59 -0800
From:	"John H. Lindsay" <jlindsay@kingston.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: Plain-Text Printing

Content Type: text/plain

Hi Gary:

You wrote:
.....
> That was my intent. I had hoped to use a sufficiently
> primitive driver to produce a nice ASCII flat file
> that I can manipulate to become the source for the new
> application.
.....

If no one else can help you here (presumably knowing the old
application or the DB genre, which would be the easier way
no doubt), get back to me. I do things with SNOBOL4, and I
can often dig things out of old files with it.

An example. When I was the computing systems consultant at
Queen's University here (one foot in each of the Computing
Centre and the newly founded Department of Computing and
Information Science), we managed to import a 6250 bpi tape
of Fortran routines to handle real and complex eigenvalue
problems from the U. of Chicago. The only problem was that
somehow, in the writing of the tape, it had been physically
stretched in a number of places. Getting the tape through
Canadian Customs was a 6-week process, and sending it back
through U.S. Customs would likely have been as long so that
getting a replacement tape was not an option.

There were several files on the tape, all of 80 byte card
images blocked 10 to a physical record (block), for 800
byte blocks. Reading the tape in the expected way produced
I/O errors, most in repeatable positions, but others
randomly. I read the tape with a utility as an unlabeled
tape (thus ignoring the logical record length and blocksize
encoded in the tape file header and trailer records) and
analysed the tape; while almost all blocks showed the
expected 800 bytes, a few showed lengths of 802 to 804
bytes. I wrote a very small SNOBOL4 program that read the
tape blocks, rewiting the tape, but recognizing, analysing,
and reconstructing the card images in the damaged blocks.
I still had to fix up a few records with an editor (where
a few individual characters were mangled) from a printed
listing.

There are both free and commercial really good SNOBOL4
systems around, and I could walk you through the process
of picking out the fields you want if I had a sample to
work with.

John.

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