Monday 20th May.

We started with a short Open Forum where attendees asked and answered questions, and talked about code.

Roger Plant gave a presentation on the BergSoft Next Suite, which he won at the recent Symposium. He demonstrated a variety of controls, and showed BergSoft’s NextInspector, which allows users to examine and modify object properties at run time.

And John McDonald gave a presentation on regular expression, showing how they allow very powerful search and replace within editors or IDEs.

For example, to replace all occurrences in your code of statements that look like:
if Uppercase(Something)=Uppercase(Anything) then
with
if SameText(Something, Anything) then
You can search for the regular expression:
if\s+Uppercase\s*\(\s*([^)]+)\s*\)\s*=\s*Uppercase\(([^)]+)\)\s*then
and replace it by:
if SameText\(\1, \2\) then

In an editor like Notepad++, this works even when the target statement goes across multiple lines.

The meeting was held at the Melbourne Men’s Shed, situated in the Federation Square Car Park building, off Russell St Extension.