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NEW FEATURES IN VISTA RELEASE 1976-11-05.

By Jacob Palme, Swedish National Defense Research Institute



MINIMAL NECESSARY CHANGES TO GET OLD PROGRAM WORKING WITH
     THE NEW PACKAGE


  1) Change "EXTERNAL INTEGER PROCEDURE trmop" into
     "EXTERNAL INTEGER PROCEDURE trmop, gettab" in the
     preamble of your program.


  2) There are two new TEXT parameters to the CLASS VISTA.
     Thus, for every "NEW VISTA" or "NEW FORM" statement in
     your program, you must add ",NOTEXT,NOTEXT" immediately
     in front of the ")".

     If you have written your own subclasses to the classes
     VISTA or FORM, corresponding changes must be made in
     NEW statements generating your subclasses.


  3) Only for users of the class FORM:  There is one new
     TEXT parameter to the class FIELD (and its subclasses).
     The new parameter can be given the value NOTEXT in "NEW
     field", "NEW alphafield" etc.  statements in your
     program.


  4) All program modules using the VISTA package must be
     recompiled.


NEW FEATURES IN THE VISTA PACKAGE


     For a fuller description of these features, see the
     VISTA.MAN manual (at QZ available on
     DSKB:VISTA.MAN[106,346].


  1) The package is much more independent of terminal make.
     It works on INFOTON VISTA, DEC VT52, MINITEC and ELITE
     terminals.  It will also work on many other kinds of
     display terminals, since the program can query the user
     about his terminal characteristics.  With the pushing
     of just 7 keys on the terminal, the user can tell the
     program how his terminal works, and the program can
     then work on almost any terminal having special
     functions for moving the cursor around the screen.

NEW FEATURES IN VISTA RELEASE 1976-11-05.             Page 2


  2) The two new text parameters to the class VISTA can be
     used by a user programmer to describe the
     characteristics of his special kind of display
     terminal.


  3) The new parameter to objects of the class FIELD in the
     FORM package is a help text, which is displayed
     automatically to the user when he types in a
     questionmark on his terminal.  By writing your own
     version of the virtual procedure HELP in the FIELD
     class, you can handle help texts longer than one line
     or other special help facilities.


  4) To get machine-independent handling of blinking text on
     the screen, two new procedures start_blink and
     stop_blink have been added.  Always use these
     procedures to create blinking text.  See the manual for
     further explanations.  Whenever you call start_blink,
     the bell will also be sounded on terminals which have a
     bell function.