Technical information

   This  section  describes  some  of  the  patches  which  were  applied to
 asl.library.   Please note that this is NOT any kind of hack nor kluge.  It
 is  simply  a  case of reverse-engineering the library and adding (with the
 Commodore programming rules in mind) several features.  As there ARE people
 who  like  to  play with undocumented/private parts of code, every possible
 step  has  been  taken  to avoid problems even in such cases.  As a result,
 during all the testing time we encountered only ONE program that won't work
 as   expected   -   PatchAsl  by  John  Corigliano  -  but  this  is  quite
 understandable  I  guess.  It would come as a big surprise if anything else
 would fail to work with this new version of asl.library.

   Now, some paragraphs for technically-minded people who would like to know
 how it works internally:

   First,  one  new  private  function  has  been  added,  which  is used by
 preferences  program  to copy new user settings to the internal ASL buffer.
 Also, prefs program saves settings to ENV:  (if "used") and to ENVARC:  (if
 "saved").   As  it  operates  on callers context, asl.library could not use
 usual  notification  routines  without  creating  additional task, which we
 thought  was  unnecessary overhead.  Hence, changing sys/asl.prefs variable
 in  ENV:   manually  won't  be  noticed  by  asl.library  - you have to use
 preferences  program  for  this  to  work.   It can be changed if it really
 bothers you, please give feedback.

   Internal  settings  buffer is obviously protected with semaphore to avoid
 havoc  that  could  break out if prefs change/requester opening happened at
 the same time.

   Whenever  new requester is being open it receives a copy of its settings.
 Private parts of File/Font/ScreenMode requesters have been extended to hold
 it.   This  way  even if you change prefs while a requester is open nothing
 wrong can happen.


   Also, text width calculations in file requester were changed, allowing it
 to look reasonably with both proportional and fixed-width fonts.