A sidebar to the article “NewWave 4.0: HP’s Windows desktop manager goes mainstream,” published in PC Magazine, May 12, 1992, pp. 44.

NewWave’s Agent language provides much more power than any other Windows batch language, but that power comes at the price of complexity. Unless you have programming experience, you’ll have trouble writing tasks that go beyond basic recording.

An Agent task is a sequence of commands to the Agent kernel or to an Object. You could, for example, program a task that would dial out to pick up stock quotes, bring the information back to a spreadsheet, and graph it for you. If the Object is a NewWave-supplied or NewWave-aware program, then there is a rich vocabulary of specialized methods to control it.

Since Agent tasks can be dynamic data exchange (DDE) clients, you’ll be able to control Windows programs that understand DDE. Other Windows and DOS programs can be controlled via Send Key and Clipboard commands.

There’s now a dialog box editor with a NewWave twist. Dialog editors in Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word for Windows, and Bridge Batch generate code in the underlying language. But NewWave creates an Object to represent the dialog box. Agent tasks can then call and query the Object.

The language comes with on-line help only. Addison-Wesley plans to publish a book on NewWave this summer. For now, mere mortals will find the language daunting.

by Barry Simon