Simple "word-scramble" stack

[Wilhelm Sanke]

Thanks for the various responses to my post!

Ken's confusion about "Klaus-Wilhelm" is tolerable and understandable, I 
mentioned Klaus in my post and seen from a Wisconsin perspective our 
hometowns are very near to each other, less than half the distance 
between Eau Claire and Green Bay (where I lived for half a year a couple 
of years ago).

> Just curious... how long did it take you to write this?



I remember that somebody intended to produce a stack (a standalone?) at 
one of the RevCons in Malta or Monterey while holding his breath - 
Geoff, Tuviah?

Indeed, I really needed a number of deep breaths, could be around one 
hour to produce a working version for the third-grader, but I did not 
keep track of the time. However, the elements necessary for this type of 
stack were all available from past experience and needed more or less 
only to be arranged in a different way.

The next day we came across the "national-characters" problem concerning 
the difference between rawkey and numtochar values, which took me 
another hour to solve and add three lines of code for the German 
"Umlauts", but I think a hangover from the night before was involved.

Transforming the German stack to international English (at least on the 
surface) when at home again and uploading the stack to my website: again 
another hour.-

Some thoughts concerning the "anagram" issue some of you pointed out:

- When used in conjunction with a translation of the sought word (see my 
first proposal for an enhancement), there would be only one correct 
solution of the scrambled characters.

- If used as a "pure" scramble game, one way to do this would be to look 
for possible combinations of a scrambled word before and list the 
alternatives as items on the same line of the lexicon field. Checking 
for the correct and alternatively correct solutions could look like this:

"if me (the content of fld "input") is among the items of Loesung 
(meaning "solution" and containing the items) then" etc..

- You could also indicate to the user how many solutions of a scrambled 
word are possible by counting the items.

- Then there remains the help feature with buttons "help" and "more 
letters". They could be simply disabled and hidden in the case of 
alternative solutions or we provide as many parallel instances of such 
help as there are alternatives - I suppose there will never be more than 
three.


Best regards and thanks for your interest,

Wilhelm Sanke
<www.sanke.org/MetaMedia>