Fixed a bunch of bugs in my Frame-Lisp library, which is the SDK I created for chatbot creation, compiler data structures support, symbolic debugging, and other stuff.  Thus, I finally got around to recompiling "Algernon" under Visual Studio 2005, with the <fstream> style headers for the iosstream library stuff, instead of the old "fstream.h" style headers and so on, and then let's not forget the 100's of strcpy style string functions that needed to be replaced with the strcpy_s style, and the "old" vs. "new" style C++ template declarations that needed to be cleaned up.  Yes, this code is that old.  Some parts are now working again, other parts never did quite work, the first time around. Primarily due to initialized buffers, buffer overruns, "off by one" errors, and so on.  Lots of stuff was finally fixed, even though I have barely even looked at this code in almost twenty years.

So, here is my first relevant conversation with Algernon in about as long:

User: What time is it?
Algernon: The time is 12:36.
User: Do you have a motivator?  Do you like spam?
Algernon: Do you like spam?
User: What tiem is it?
Algernon: Why does it matter what it?
User: What time is it?
Algernon: I already told you the stupid time! why does it matter what it?
>What about the weather?

Then, of course, it crashed.  This is going to take a while to figure out.  Kind of fun to be able to connect over a Telnet connection and watch the diagnostic and debugging information stream on the application's own console window.  When it says "no rain" that means that although it found a keyword match in the binary tree - it hasn't actually trained on an instance of Mega-Hal or its own internal Spagetiti engine so as to try to generate some spew, that is if the format of the input suggests that maybe it should.  This is where the multi-threading, multi-model, pipelined approach is going to come in later, hopefully.

Likewise, it is going to get really interesting when this all gets up and running on an Arduino or a Propeller.