Thank you for taking the time to find out more about PST, the Programmers String Tool for WinNT and Win95.

If you want to run PST right now, and want to find out how to use is it, run PST -a for a complete explanation of  how to use PST.  (Run PST -h for the short summary screen.)

Please register your copy of PST. You can find the standard registration information on the PST About screen (PST -a).

Alternate Registration:

In addition to standard registration, you can also register in the following ways:
1)  Put PST on 3 electronically accessible bulletin boards, web sights etc..
(Please give me this information so that I can keep this BBS up to date.)
 
 -OR-

2)  Find one or more reproducible bugs complete with a full explanation.
There is an undocumented DEBUG feature built into PST which may be of some help, the Verify (-v) switch. This switch will compare the original input buffer with the translated output.
PST will go through full processing even if the Match string and the Replacement string are exactly the same. Because of this, the following would be a valid usage of the -v switch:
Pst -v -b int int MyCppFile.cpp
This command replaces all occurrences of "int" with "int", creates a backup and does the Verify operation. PST will complain if the files differ, in which case the backup (-b) will be useful in determining what went wrong.

-OR-

3)  Perform timing tests against AWK, Gres and any other string tools you may have hanging around.
These tests are especially hard to do because all of these tools are so different. 
What I am looking for is an indication of how well I addressed the speed issue.
Things to note and watch out for:
a)  If the tool you are testing has no, or little output, turn off PST output with PST -q
b)  Set the BACKUPS option in PST to match that of the tool you are testing against.
c)  I would be very surprised if the tool you are testing did not require a Regular Expression in order to perform the same translation that PST can do.
d)  If the tool is freeware or shareware I would appreciate a copy so that I can continue refining PST to be a true competitor. 
e)  I usually run a test several times in a row without running anything in-between. This is because disk-caching will cause erroneous  results.
f)  Please be scientific with your results. Don't simply tell me "tool x is faster than PST". This won't cut it.


I hope you get many years of useful service out of PST. I expect however that the integrated development environments available today will include this functionality very soon as a built-in service. 
But, until they do; Enjoy!

Thank you,

Luke S. Tomasello
Internet 102620.1554@compuserve.com