Student Version Basis of AI Backprop Hypertext Documentation

Copyright (c) 1990-97 by Donald R. Tveter

The Command Line

There are two ways to call the program, first with a file that has commands in it, suppose the file is xor.bp then you can use:

bp xor.bp
or the program could be called without the file name and you could use buttons within the program to read a file full of commands.

The program is designed to look good at a resolution of 800x600 and unlike the current UNIX version there is no provision to change this from the command line at this time.

Menus and Menu Windows

There are a few plain menus in the program, the File menu and the Cmds menu, the other buttons on the top line of the menu bar select menu windows where there are combinations of buttons, entry boxes and informative text.

Entry Boxes

When you type in a new value in an entry box window you MUST end the sequence with a carriage return (the Enter key) in order to set the new value. This is slightly different from the current UNIX version where entry boxes with red text on a white background represent parameters that are only changed when some other button is pressed. Also unlike the UNIX version there is no "Change" button to change the values without typing the carriage return.

Maximum Lines in the Canvas Area

Output from commands is written to the bottom of the window area and the 100 most recent lines are kept, only a fraction of which will actually be visible. Unlike the UNIX version you cannot change the number of lines kept even though there is an entry box to do this. Vertical scrolling with the line up, line down, page up and page down functions now works however setting the scroll position with the scroll bar button is not working right in this 3.x version apparently due to a bug in the Watcom 10.6 routines, it works in the W95 version.

The Paging Mechanism

When there is a large amount of output from a command it is convenient to get it page by page and to stop the output of the command if necessary. For example you may have 100 patterns to list and if you decide to list them you may be happy seeing only the first 20. To implement paging the program resets a line count parameter for every command and when the number of lines output from the command reaches the page size a "More?" box comes up that works like the traditional more command only here you have to click your choice rather than type. The choices are one more page, half a page, one line, stop paging or break the command loop. The default page size is 20 and it can be reset by entering a new value in the entry box in the GUI menu window.

Fonts

The only available fonts are the OEM fixed, ANSI fixed and System fixed fonts.

Colors

In the GUI menu window you can choose the background color and the text color. I chose what I thought are reasonable combinations, black on white or almost white or white, green, yellow and orange on dark blue or black.