Custom Input Dialog
Volume Number: 1
Issue Number: 8
Column Tag: Pascal Procedures
"Custom Dialog Box for Input" 
By Alan Wootton, President, Top-Notch Productions, MacTutor
Contributing Editor
Our Project for this month is to create a pair of input statements for MacPascal.
In Basic, there is a command that prompts the user for a number or a string. It would
be nice to have this for MacPascal, but would be even better if it could be implemented
using the excellent MacIntosh user interface. Towards this end, we will be using the
Dialog Manager, Package 7, and Resources.
Previous generations of computers provided only files as storage entities. Any
small or large chunk of numbers to be accessed by the operating system usually
required a file to hold it. If a program needed a large number of small data areas the
result was usually a large number of files. This happened all too often.
The Mac is different. On the Mac a file name actually represents two files. One of
these is the usual type of file, the other is full of tiny sub files. A whole new world!
Naturally, there is a sort of directory to go with these sub files.
Inside Mac calls the two files "forks" of a file. The subfiles are " resources" and
the directory is the "resource map". In a normal file system all files are referred to
by name and possibly a version number. Resources are referred to by a four character
Referenced by (2):