MacSiRiL Overview

MacSiRiL is a proving program that runs on the Macintosh, though it's not a proper Macintosh Application as we understand them -- it uses a single small text window and is entirely keyboard driven. My excuse is that I wrote it a long time ago (in Think Pascal), before I learned anything about Macintosh internals. However, I found it sufficiently useful as it stood, so even when I learned some more, I never felt the need to make it look sexy. In theory MacSiRiL should be fairly portable (e.g. to Delphi on a PC) as well, but I never did that either because I don't have a PC. I still run an ancient 6800-based Quadra, so for all I know it might not even run on Apple PowerPC processors either.

MacSiRiL is kind of macro-processor for place notation, based on ideas by Jim Taylor and Tom Goodyer before him. If you've used MicroSiril on a PC then you'll be familiar with the kind of thing you have to write, though MacSiRiL is generalised in a number of powerful ways. Pieces of place notation are named and expressions constructed from these named pieces to define peal-length sequences of notation. The definitions are entered into the system from the keyboard, or read from a text file. Requests cause MacSiRiL to generate the rows defined by the place notation and use them in various ways, such as listing and proving them.

I've given copies to a few brave souls over the years, so there exists some rudimentary documentation. If you haven't used this kind of thing at all, go to the (half-completed) reference manual. Computer nerds can go straight to the language summary, or download a (Binhex'd) version to play with. Good luck, and don't forget to let me know how you get on with it.

Roger Bailey