Re: Re: was "open sourcing discontinued offerings" in Midrange-NonTech

Keith,

>What functionality do you lose when you're in WP mode ?

IIRC:

The ability to define fields (output, input, or both).  The ability to use
display attributes and indicators.  No subfiles or error message subfiles.  in
fact, no display record formats at all.  It doesn't even look like the Dynamic
Screen Manager APIs includes support for WP mode.  So to write a program
enabling WP mode for the user, I think you'd need to do virtually all screen
interaction via User Defined Data Streams (UDDS).

I haven't looked at the WP mode docs in probably 15 years (and then it was on
the S/36), and I never implemented software using it.  So my recollection could
be wrong.

But IIRC, when a display station switched to WP mode, the area in the WS
controller normally used for the "input field table" which contains the field
format words, field control words, etc gets reused for other information.

The screen contains an "audit window", scale line, operator message area, etc
but mostly just lines which make up the "text screen" portion.  Each line in
this area has attribute bits to control whether input is allowed, if word spill
to the next line should occur, which "scale line" should appear while the cursor
is on the line, etc.

I may remember wrong.  They say memory is the second thing to go...

Doug