Dear Eric, 

Thank you for your excellent course, and for your prompt inquiry about my successful download and installation.

So far, there are no problems with either. If any problems come up, I will surely let you know.  I am very impressed with the quality of the course, and the completed work you are thereby making available to others. And I am very impressed with what all this says about your character and abilities.

I am involved in a very ambitious project, for which I need to write excellent software, and your course is going to make this a lot easier for me than I expected. One part of this software is a relational database management system. I have actually been working with a prototype of it for several years. It is faithful to the relational theory, and makes no use of SQL or anything much like it. Rather, the core of the system is a library of primitive functions which transform relational tables. The relational tables themselves make full use of the "domain" concept in the theory as developed by Date and Darwen.

...
 

Dear Eric,

Thank you for your marvellous training package.
This is just to confirm that I have successfully downloaded all lessons and printed the documentation.  I have of course not been able to run it all through in detail yet, but it looks just great.

Best regards
 

Mr. Lescasse,

Almost a year and a half after you published the APL+Win Tutorial chapters on GUI error trapping, I've finally gotten around to learning your techniques and adapting them to my applications, and I want to let you know how pleased I am with the results.  Understanding the HANDLERFOR function has eluded me for years until reading your straightforward explanation, and I can now deliver my applications without worrying that they will crash when my mistakes are uncovered by users.

I also wanted to mention some changes I made to GuiError that might interest you.

First, I check at the top of the function to see if the runtime interpreter is operating, and if not, just send the DM on to the ELX handler and drop out to the Session Manager instead of showing the error dialog or writing to errors.sf. Since no one else ever uses my applications in the development environment, and I almost always want to return to the Session Manager when I encounter errors, this works best for me.

Second, I added an edit control to the error window shown to the users so they can enter comments about what they were doing when the error occurred, and these are saved with the other status information (as the error window closes instead of at the beginning.)

Third, I added SYSID, SYSVER and the Windows version number to the status information saved by GuiError.

So far my version of GuiError has worked successfully and I've been able to fix bugs immediately on receipt of the errors.sf file via email from a user. I feel this is a great enhancement to my applications.

I just wanted to let you know how much your work on the Tutorial continues to be appreciated!

Sincerely
 

Eric-- I wanted to thank you again for your wonderful APL*Win training package. Not only is it a very clear and complete explanation of nearly everything one would want to use in writing an APL*Win application, but more importantly, you provide a virtually complete toolset with which to approach the task! I certainly look forward to additional installments when you have time to write them...

Bonjour Eric,

Je tiens à te féliciter pour tes leçons d'entrainement de 1997.  Je suis certain que cela a aidé beaucoup la cause d'APL.  Par tes nombreux exemples tu as démontré que l'on pouvait tout faire ce que l'on veut en APL.  Merci encore et tiens moi informé de tes nouvelles leçons de 1998...
     

Dear Eric,

I am lagging very much behind with following up on your monthly training course, but I consider it as well written and exceptionally useful for my slow conversion from making DOS to Windows applications.

Thus I'd like to have an invoice from you for the 1998 subscription...

Eric,

I have to take my hat off to you.

Your APL+Win tutorials are outstanding. If APL ever becomes a main stream language it will be due, to a very large part, to your work. Your tutorials will not only make a Windows programmer out of an APL'er but could also make APL'ers out of "C" programmers.

Please use me as a reference. I would be glad to accept phone calls.

Cheers.
     

Regarding your Qwi-utility. In my opinion, this is one of the most important findings in APL in recent years. It allows APL to be an almost full-blown OOP-language. There are some things to do of course, such as more work on non-visible objects as I mentionned in my last message. I feel that support for OOP-programming using the Qwi-technique, building your own object classes, in the future, should be built into APL (maybe a Œqwi).
     

Eric,

I have appreciated very much your willingness to respond to
questions about your material.
...
I continue to love your material and have found it very useful. I know
most of the material on nested arrays, but still learned a lot from it.
     

Dear Eric,

Your last training package was terrific. The OOP stuff is very useful.
I've spent a couple of evenings putting together a "ToggleList" object
just to learn the programming technique. I saw Chris presentation in
Orlando and understood right away the great benefits with this
technique but I haven't had time to dig into his work. Maybe Chris
already have developed a kind of "ToggleList" already, but it was fun
doing it. I'm inclosing the "ToggleList" in this message...
     

Hi Eric,

Pourriez-vous me communiquer le mot de passe pour la version 1.9.16 s'il vous plaît?

By the way, je n'ai pu m'empêcher de lire l'intégralité de la doc du mois
d'avril: bravo!

La description de la programmation orientée objet est d'une clarté
rarement atteinte dans la littérature consacrée à ce domaine.

Amicalement,
     

I've just sent the following fax to Mr. Baelen.
_________________________________
Hello Mr. Baelen,

Sometimes, something comes along that works so well and is so needed that it would be a mistake not to make it available to everyone.

I think that Mr. Eric Lescasse's implementation of OCXPrinter in his last lesson is such a case.

I think you should buy or license or make some deal to include it for free
in your official release of version 2.0 of APL+WIN.

It's so elegantly designed, using his object technology, that just about
anyone can figure out how to have beautiful printed reports in about an hour.

I put it on a par with your addition of control structures.
     

Hello Eric,

Very good. The more I use the OCXPrinter the more I like it.
APL2000 should buy it from you so they could give it to everyone in their official release of  version 2.0.

It's the biggest improvement to their interpreter since control structures.
     

Hello Eric,

Wonderful stuff on OOP.

I get a chuckle when you say how easy it is. It's easy to use, but not easy to figure out how to design it.  It seems to me that, over the years, that everyone else that attempted to do something like it in APL botched it or over complicated it.
     

I just tried Chapter 9 Error Handling.
Mighty clever.
     

Hello Eric,

I just want to let you know how happy I am with GuiPrint.  You know, from the time of FONEVBX.W3 lesson I tried to do something similar.

GuiPrint is at least an order of magnitude better in ease of use and appearance than the junk I came up with.

I'll bet everyone is very pleased with it.
     

Hello Eric,

I just want to let you know how happy I am with GuiPrint.
You know, from the time of FONEVBX.W3 lesson I tried to do something similar.

GuiPrint is at least an order of magnitude better in ease of use and appearance than the junk I came up with.

I'll bet everyone is very pleased with it.
     

Eric, you last lesson IS really superb !

The PRINT.W3 is well commented, fine to understand and easy to integrate into my apps.

It is very exciting and I learned a lot ! There are only few FNS which could easy to be handled and motified.  Maybe we will get a "lean" version of your FONEVBX.W3, also with a small number of FNS
which could as easy integrated as PRINT.W3 !

Thany you very much for your great work !!!
     

Your training program is great - a giant step forward. I am using your stuff all the time now.
     

The printed doc is quite a "treasure trove of goodies", and I am anxiously looking forward to poring through it all! For too long now I've been programming in APL WIN with only Manugistics original Reference Manuals as my guide, which, although detailed, do not really hand-hold you through the "proper" design and implementation of an APL WIN application. Finally, your doc has arrived to sate my hunger pangs!

Thanks! And keep the great goodies coming!
     

It has been a wonderful help.

Using your ss functions as guides and with a little guesswork I now display all output to a grid with the scrollbars off, and the cols and row headings off, and with protection enabled.

This has saved me hours of drawing little edit boxes.
     

... However my skills are hardly anything compared to yours. I actually trusted them by purchasing our own course copy without even having had time to peek into the sample first. Well, today I did, and printed the documents. Excellent work, this will be gratifying to sell. And will help a lot to sell APL+Win too. You are right, the FONEVBX example is a very hot example.

I think it will be very useful for demos.