From csr@calvin.dgbt.doc.ca Wed Oct 14 16:59:53 1992
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Date: Wed, 14 Oct 92 17:03:06 EDT
From: csr@calvin.dgbt.doc.ca (Andrew Patrick)
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To: cbbrowne@csi.uottawa.ca (Christopher Browne)
Subject: am (part00/1)
Status: O


Here is my second attempt at a submission of 'am'.  The following is a summary
of how I addressed the various problems/comments of the reviewers:

> The -e option to support fractional or missing payments gives AM
> a big advantage over other amortization utilities I've seen -- AM
> is actually useful in real life; others lacking this flexibility are not.

Good, but not good enough.  I've hit problems where the '-e' was not complete
enough to get the job done.  I have taken the '-e' and turned it into a '-e'
and a '-u' command line arguments with additional abilities to handle the
more complex cases I was running into.

> At least one major vendor (SCO) unbundles nroff and provides preformatted
> manpages, so you can't count on having nroff.  It would probably make the
> program more widely usable if it could do its own formatting.

> Otherwise, the roff codes are an annoyance.  They
> should be controlled by a command line option, and the default
> should be to *not* produce them.

I have changed the sense of the '-f' option.  The default is to NOT output
nroff commands.  Adding the '-f' adds the nroff commands for a cleaner listing.

> There was also a manifest file, rather than the more usual MANIFEST file.

I re-named it.

> AM uses scanf() to parse its interactive input, rather than
> fgets()+sscanf().  I consider this a serious deficiency,

Good comments.  I've changed over to the fgets()+sscanf() form.  It does
work better now.

> My only real complaint is that I'd like better defaults.

Along with the above, I have added defaults for all the questions.

> The Makefile should refer to $(CC), rather than cc.  This is a
> quite minor blemish.

Done.

--
							Brett Carver
							(707) 577-4344
							brett@sr.hp.com