
     FreeForm is a 3-D spreadsheet.  It is very useful in certain types
of problems and useless in others.

     FreeForm assumes that calculations are done on entire rows or columns at a
time and the results are deposited in other entire rows or columns.  It
therefore is well suited to ledger sheets sort of applications.  The 3-D nature
becomes apparent when you realize that you can set up a sheet, for example, for
each month's activity of a business.  Each month's sheet can be stacked behind
the next month's sheet and year end consolidations can be done on all twelve
sheets to end up with grand totals.  Up to 100 sheets (all must be of identical
format) can be stacked.

     FreeForm does not allow calculations of individual cells so that it is
nearly useless in an application such as a tax calculator.  You pays your money
and takes your chances.

     FreeForm uses real numbers for all of it calculations so that 4 word reals
are necessary to obtain any kind of precision.  A 2 word real version is
provided for those that don't have 4 word reals on their iron, but its use 
is strictly limited as dollar figures can only be represented to $9,999.99
before you start losing track of the odd cents.  Also, if you build data files
with two word reals, and then switch to 4 word reals, THE DATA WILL NOT BE
COMPATIBLE!!!

     The screen control features of FreeForm have been modified extensively
by the reviewer (yours truly, gws) to allow the software to be transported
to different types of terminals.  The author used the screen control values
found in KERNEL to obtain the values of the arrow keys and such.  However, he
did not allow for terminals with two-character sequences (such as an H-19). The
use of KERNEL also made the program un-compilable on most hardware without
extended memory as the compilation of KERNEL uses up most of memory for mere
mortal iron.

     The program has been modified to eliminate the dependance on KERNEL.
It now uses SCREENOPS instead.  In this way it becomes terminal independant.
However, since SCREENOPS does not support HOME, KEY_TO_INSERT_CHARACTER, or
KEY_TO_DELETE_CHARACTER, these features are no longer available.  The
modifications have been done in a haphazard style (typical of this
particular reviewer) so that some of the old code has been commented out and
some of it has been entirely removed.  It will now compile on most IV.x
p-systems.  If you are using a p-system older than IV.1 then you must comment
out the selective uses list for SCREENOPS (found in FF.FREEFRM).

     regards - gws

