This page uses CSS, and renders properly in the latest versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla.
This is Frontier: The Definitive Guide by Matt Neuburg, unabridged and unaltered from the January 1998 printing.
It deals with the freeware Frontier 4.2.3; for commercial Frontier 8, look here, and for the inexpensive Radio UserLand, look here. See my Web site for information.
Those wishing an offline or printed copy may purchase the book, which is still in print.
Copyright 1998 O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Reprinted with permission.
TOP UP: Preface NEXT: Strings and Chars

III

Data Manipulation

This section continues the exposition of the UserTalk language to an advanced level, explaining how UserTalk manipulates and operates upon various kinds of data. There is a description of how UserTalk verbs and operators work upon strings and characters, numbers and other mathematical entities, and dates.

The basic Frontier entities such as the database, tables and table entries, outlines, wptexts, and so on, are also grist for UserTalk's mill: UserTalk can manipulate these like any other kind of data, creating and destroying database entries, rearranging outlines, editing wptexts, and so forth. UserTalk can read and write data in files on disk, both the data fork and the resource fork. Frontier is multithreaded, and threads too are a kind of "data" on which UserTalk can operate.

Finally, I describe an "artifical" datatype (stacks) implemented entirely with scripts; and there is a sketch of how UserTalk is extended through compiled code fragments (with further technical details in Part VII, Reference).

Readers aiming to take advantage of the full power of UserTalk will wish to study this section. On the other hand, those who are experiencing Frontier for the first time and who presently wish only to acquire an initial overview may prefer to proceed to Part IV, Interface.


TOP UP: Preface NEXT: Strings and Chars

This is Frontier: The Definitive Guide by Matt Neuburg, unabridged and unaltered from the January 1998 printing.
It deals with the freeware Frontier 4.2.3; for commercial Frontier 8, look here, and for the inexpensive Radio UserLand, look here. See my Web site for information.
Those wishing an offline or printed copy may purchase the book, which is still in print.
Copyright 1998 O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Reprinted with permission.