CompuServe Messages

David, Not to discourage you, but I have to ask the obvious question. With all the *dozens* of MS-DOS menu programs that are over in the IBM forums, many/most of which (I'd guess) are generic enough to work on the Rainbow… why? Call me a cynic, or an old something-else if you want… I hope you're doing this "just for fun!" But as long as you asked, the menu system my company uses in its products (not on MS-DOS) doesn't use ANY kind of "menu database". The menu descriptions are simply text files. Each line in the file contains a description of one part of the menu: the (internal) menu name, title, subtitle, name of a graphic "background" file that is displayed along with the menu text, and one line for each entry on the menu. Each line is "tagged" with its function, e.g.: MENU:Mainmenu TITLE:"WhizBang Products Corp. Main Menu" BACKGROUND:"filename" ITEM:WP,"WordPerfect",RUN:"wp" ITEM:AF,"Auxiliary Functions",GOTO:Afmenu ITEM:F,"Finished",RUN:"logout" MENU:Afmenu TITLE:"WhizBang Products Corp. Auxiliary Menu" BACKGROUND:"filename" ITEM:D,"Directory of files",RUN:"dir" (…etc.) Multiple menus can exist within a single text file. Each menu-entry contains several comma-separated fields; each field is tagged with its function (except for the "description" part) as you can see above. The 1- or 2-character "item" legend is what the user types to select the menu item. Menu items can do different things; GOTO branches to a submenu, RUN executes a program, and there are others (e.g. READ another menu file). There is a menu 'compiler' which does syntax verification and produces a 'binary' version of the menu but there is really no advantage to doing that; the text version, interpreted by a menu 'interpreter', is just as fast, and will syntax-check each line as it is displayed. -Bill