Meta-TWOG

DATE: 2013-12-13

A TWOG about the TWOG. 

Since TWENEX.ORG's web server seem to be running fairly stably recently, I've
been think of creating a simple blog-generator for the site with TWOG as the
flag-ship example.

I soon hit a snag in that of all the wonderful high-level languages installed
here, none of them seem to have a way to do something as simple as read a list
of file name from a directory. Of the few examples where such a feature is
documented in a manual, the Twenex installation is missing the crucial library
or function needed to make it work.

I'd almost resigned myself to some hideous ad-hocery, like using @DIR to save
a list of directory files for input to the blog generator.

However, an unexpected e-mail from user VULCAN reminded me of a truth I'd
discovered before: In DECsystem-land, the funnest code is in MACRO assembler
language. With VULCAN's encouragement, I may finally give in to the dark side,
and hack anything I want with TECO and DDT.