WHAT Version 2 Release Notes (10-Mar-19)

WHAT, Wolfberg's Helpful Anagramming Tool, is really a toolbox of integrated powerful tools, with many facilities. From time to time, the program is updated with bug fixes and the support of new features. This page outlines changes made starting in 2015 as Version 2.0 (91) was first released. See what_release_notes.html which covered releases from 2009 through 2011 for WHAT Version 1.2.

Version 2.2 Release 101 made 18-Jul-19

• Added to the distribution: new desktop shortcut to run WHAT with CSW2019, new lexicon CSW2019.WLX, new definition file CSW19defs.txt, and new playability file CSW2019.WPB. (done 29-Jun-19)
• Added to the Download WHAT Updates page: 7 current desktop shortcuts, paired with their initialization files; a category of older initialization files. (done 18-Jul-19)

Version 2.2 Release 100 made 9-Feb-19

• FISE2009 and FISE2009+ have been renamed to Spanish2009 and Spanish2009+. New lexicons NWL2018.WLX, NSWL2018.WLX, OWL16.WLX, and definition files NWL18defs.txt and CSWdefs.txt were added the WHAT distribution.
• Show a NASPA icon on the Challenge Dialog when there is sufficint room and a NASPA lexicon is the Challenge lexicon.
• On the Select Lexicons Dialog, make the NASPA lexicons active links to webpages; underline and bold the descriptions to indicate this is the case.
• Fixed a minor bug which was demonstrated by TOWZIER??/S showing an 8-letter result in addition to the 3 expected 9-letter results.
• Fixed a bug involved with noting game history when reading a .gcg file for a played game. This had been demonstated by the file ss2103.gcg in http://wolfberg.net/scrabble/wolfberg.
• Fixed a bug involving setting the font size based on the .ini file.
• Changed "Scrabble" to "SCRABBLE" in many places.

Version 2.2 Release 99 made 10-Jul-18

• Added a new kind of Query Result, namely Unordered Strings. This helps support the presentation of words in an ordered which is alphabetical by strings being reversed. For example:

  WHAT?: /=' ! // no sorting in presentations
  
   (nothing)
   
  WHAT?: aye?
  
  ABYE     AYES     EYAS     YAGE+    YEAH     YEAR
  AERY     EASY     EYRA     YARE     YEAN     YEAS
   
  WHAT?: []  // uppercase the words
  
  ABYE     AYES     EYAS     YAGE+    YEAH     YEAR
  AERY     EASY     EYRA     YARE     YEAN     YEAS
   
  WHAT?: [~]/qs  // reverse each of the words and sort
  
  ARYE     ERAY     HAEY     RAEY     SAYE     YREA
  EGAY     EYBA     NAEY     SAEY     SEYA     YSAE
   
  WHAT?: [~]/qus // reverse each of the and leave order as is
  
  EYRA     YARE     YEAH     YEAR     EYAS     AERY
  YAGE     ABYE     YEAN     YEAS     AYES     EASY
   
  WHAT?:

• Fixed a minor bug which showed up when deleting the slate using the command of /0D. This affected the shown choices in the menu for the Word Reference Source.
• End of SCRABBLE® and Super Scrabble® games bonus amounts have been repaired. WHAT had sometimes been using the incorrect value of 381 points in an opponent's rack; that is the total points in the 100 tiles in a bag.
• OWL3defs.txt has been updated.

Version 2.2 Release 98 made 8-Jun-18

• WHAT was having problems when a query with a word reference, such as [], also included filtering by length. It used to issue an error message when the filtering did not pass with at least one of the words in wordlist used as the source for word references. This problem has been fixed, but doing this kind of query may be confusing. If wordlist 99 includes words of various lengths, and you issue a command such as /99[ [] /|=3, the result will be those three-letter words which are prefixes of all words in wordlist 99.
  
  
• Random rack creation has been enhanced, so that you can fix the number of blanks to be included with each random rack generated.
  
  
• OWL3defs.txt has been updated.

Version 2.2 Release 97 made 27-Aug-16

WHAT Release 96 was made only privately during development.

• A small bug was fixed involved with using arrow keys to select moves from the list of moves in the History tab (in the dialog for playing games on a board) intermixed with clicking on such lines.
  
  
• When bringing up the the dialog for playing games on a board for the first time since WHAT was started, the cursor is now centered over the Close button, and that button has focus. Therefore, if you don't want to use that dialog, you can simply press the Enter key.
  
  
• When using the dialog for playing games on a board, the support of dragging and dropping tiles among the board, the rack, and the unseen tiles has been cleaned up.
  
  
• A couple of bugs were fixed when WHAT is asked to show move choices in the dialog for playing games on a board. The one test which demoed two bugs is to use the Make Moves activity and first put ADO on the board at 8G; then set the rack to ?Z. Next click on Show Move Choices button. There were two problems:
  • Some of the moves in the choices which used the blank also had that blanks in the rack leave.
  • Some of the moves included an at-sign as a tile placed on the board.
  
  
• When a user changed the number of choices being shown on the Choices tab (in the dialog for playing games on a board). The choice being shown when choices were not being hidden was the first choice, but the details of that choice were not being shown on the board nor in the Command shown. This small bug has been fixed.
  
  
• A small change was made in the format of heading titles in the output for showing choices on the Choices tab in dialog for playing games on a board.
  
  
• Some new similar features are introduced when working in the dialog for playing games:
  • When the board has tiles on it, you may click the right mouse button over a board cell to present a small menu which allows you copy either the horizontal word (if there is one) or vertical word (if there is one) to the workspace.
    
    
  • When the rack has tiles in it, you may click the right mouse button over a rack cell to present a small menu which allows you to copy the rack to the workspace.
    
    
  • When there are move choices being shown, you may click the right mouse button over a choice to present a small menu which allows you to copy the word shown as the choice to the workspace. If you double-click on a choice, the definition of that word will be shown in the Definitions Window.
    
    
  • When there are moves being shown in the history, you may click the right mouse button over a move to present a small menu which allows you to copy the word shown as the choice to the workspace. If you double-click on a shown move in the history, the definition of that word will be shown in the Definitions Window.
    
    
  • A new feature is introduced: the /Y command now supports the forming of a new wordlist based on words from two existing wordlists. This kind of operation is known by the term "cross-product". The character to specify this operation is an askerisk (*). For example, the command

       /Y1=2*3

    creates wordlist1 based on words from wordlist2 and wordlist3. A cross-product means every word from wordlist2 is concatenated to every word from wordlist3. It is acceptable for wordlist2 and wordlist3 to be the same list.
    
    
  • A new feature is introduced: when the slate is probed for showing the nth letter of all words, the syntax now allows for a digit zero to be specified instead of leaving it blank. In this case, a maximum of 500 items are shown, rather than usual limit of 50. Furthermore, if the output is more compact, counts precede each repeated letter.
    
    
  • When limiting to 50 the output of showing the nth letters of all words, an ellipsis is appended when there are more than 50 items.
    
    
  • Dragging tiles in the dialog for playing games had some problems which are now fixed. For example, when placing tiles on the board, you may drag tiles from the unseen tiles pool and place them where you want them.
    
    
  • A bug which had been causing crashes has been fixed. It was in support of handling a query in which the word source is the slate. A query which caused a crash was:
    

       /0I .. )

    after this query set up two words on the slate:

       AB

    The form of query which caused the crash is unlikely to be useful, and so it is unlikely this bug had been noticed in the past.
    
    
  • New commands were added to WHAT's repertoire which set one of the three lexicons: primary, secondary, or challenges. Although these lexicons can be selected on the dialog accessed via the Lexicon tab at the upper right of the WHAT screen, setting via commands may be useful to users, such as when lexicon changing may be desired within command files. The new commands are:
    • /PL"<lexicon-name>" - to set the Primary lexicon,
    • /SL"<lexicon-name>" - to set the Secondary lexicon,
    • /CL"<lexicon-name>" - to set the Challenges lexicon,
    
    
  • WHAT now can output the text in the Definitions Window. As with other files, the text can be placed into a created file, or it can be appended to an existing file. There are new commands to support this.
    
    
  • There were some problems with the presentation of suffix indicator characters to show words which are in the primary and not the secondary lexicons. This was first noticed when the secondary lexicon was listed first in the list of lexicons. The problems were first noticed using Spanish lexicons, but the problems were not Spanish-specific. The bugs were fixed.
    
    
  • The button to set the number of blanks on the dialog for playing games on a board has been moved to the bottom of the list of unseen tiles.
    
    
  • When you are using the GUI to add a query constituent which is a query-based set and the query has at least one wild card character, such as an asterisk, then the query constituent placed on the line in the workspace is now correct. This is a fixed bug.
    
    
  • When you are using the dialog to add user-defined set to a query, this is done on the User-Defined Set tab in the Add a Query Constituent Dialog. There were some problems which have now been fixed with when the OK button is enabled there and when the drop-down list of user-defined sets is cleared.
    
    
  • Two bugs involving the Add a Rack Letter or Blank Dialog have been fixed:
    • when selecting the Blank tab and then calling up the same dialog, a crash had been happening; and
    • when adding a blank to a rack in the current query, the characters appended to the line in the workspace used to be lacking the question mark.
    
    
  • Some changes were made in the previous release relating to WHAT's being aware of the kinds of items in wordlists. There were two fixed problems:
    • A further problem with this topic was noticed and fixed. The bug was causing WHAT to produce inconsistent results because of uninitialized data; sometimes a wordlist was thought to have words and sometimes it was thought to have non-words.
    • When a query was being made with word references and the source wordlist has strings, when filtering is being done, such as filtering based on the number of words, the kinds of items in the result was being set to words. Once this was fixed, the kinds of items are based on the source word list's kinds of items. An example which demonstrates this fix is to begin with the command x. /QS which produces 26 strings. Then the query [] /A /#>0 # had resulted in announcing there were 5 words in the result, but with the bug fixed, 5 strings are correctly announced.
    
    
  • If a query was made in which a word reference is made (denoted by []), along with filtering, such as with the example just above, a subsequent query, such as x. /QS, was causing WHAT to hang. This bug has been fixed.
    
    
  • There was a bug which is now fixed causing WHAT to bomb when copying items from a wordlist to a to-be-created wordlist. This was also related to the above topic.
    
    
  • The query /-[ x[] involves the specification of the word reference source being the lexicon. A problem exemplified by this query was finding no answers. The bug has been fixed, and now that query finds the correct 8 words for the OWL3 lexicon.
    
    
  • When a filtering specification is placed into the workspace as a result of a user employing the GUI on the Query tab, these filtering specifications for 5 types of filtering used to be terminated with two spaces. This is been fixed to have only one space be included. If the user wants to then make the filtering specification long-term, the BACKSPACE should be pressed before typing the exclamation point.
    
    
  • When using the GUI to change the word reference source on the Query tab, the command which is put into the workspace used to be terminated with a space, and that space is no longer appended. This now makes it natural to make that request long-term by appending an exclamation point. This matches the behavior for using the GUI to change the word source.
    
    
  • When the current word reference source is the lexicon, which is an unusual setting, what is shown on the Query tab for that setting had been incorrect; this bug has been fixed.
    
    
  • There was a small bug which was fixed involving command scanning during typing in the workspace. As an example, if you selected the Scoring tab at the upper right of the WHAT screen and then clicked on Blanks Score Zero, you saw /Z in the workspace. Then if you held down the shift key and pressed 1 to type an exclamation point, you should have seen the Blanks Score Zero indicator turn green, but it was not doing so immediately; this happened only after the shift key was released.
    
    
  • When using the dialog to add a word or subword to the current query, the repetition count had been set back to one all the time. This is no longer the case.
    
    
  • The /G command can be used to specify a grid to be shown in the 5 x 5 Grid Game Dialog. When specifying a grid this way, any digram tile was mishandled and not seen as a digram. This deficiency has been fixed.
    
    
  • A new feature was added, which is to have WHAT support associating a playability number with each word, based on data collected by John O'Laughlin. WHAT can either provide a probability number or a playability number for a word. The same syntax already in use for probability is alternatively for playability. Turn on using playability via a menu-pick in the File menu. The user can configure WHAT to look for a playability file. A playability file can be of either of two encodings. One is a text file, indicated by a file extension of .txt, and then each line of the file is a word; the most playable word starts the file, and subsequent lines have increasing playability numbers; thus a word's playablity number is the line number it is on in the text form of the playability file. The alternate encoding of the playability data is in a binary file whose file extension is .WPB for WHAT playability. The same data is encoded in this binary file as the data encoded in the text form of the file. WHAT is distributed with a binary form of a playability file for the CSW2015 Lexicon. The file and whether playability is on initially can be controlled in the WHAT Initialization File. Whereas probability numbers are preferred when they are high, playability numbers are preferred when they are low.
    
    
  • The option to Revert to Challenge Ruling was formerly being set when challenges were being recorded based on the Record Challenges Times set in WHAT. This option has been made independent of whether challenges are being recorded. The setting for Revert to Challenge Ruling can be set at WHAT startup to a chosen value, and it can also be set (to a possibly different value) when challenge recording is started. These settings are now specified in the .ini (WHAT initialization) file.
    
    
  • The WHAT Initialization File has new sections to specify:
  • playability instead of probability,
  • challenge reverting settings,
  • timer settings,
  • hook presentation separators,
  • settings for the Probe Answer Window,
  • settings for the 5 x 5 Grid Game.
  
  
• A sentence was added to the New Initialization File Dialog to say that you likely have to be running as administrator to make a new initialization file using WHAT. The dialog now supports some additonal categories of has some more
  
  
• On the Presentation tab at the left of the WHAT window, the presentation of what sorts are being chosen is done using 2 tabs to squeeze the info into a small space. There has been a problem when switching between the two tabs, and this has now been corrected.
  
  
• When a wordlist is imported, WHAT checks to see if every line has a word in the primary lexicon. If so, WHAT categorizes that wordlist as having words; otherwise, that wordlist is considered to have strings.
  
  
• When front or back back are shown in slate presentation, there is a user-specified front hooks separator included in the output which separates the front hook letters from the word. Similarly, there is a user-specified back hooks separator included in the output which separates the word from the back hook letters. In order to specify these separators, menu pick View->Hook Presentation Separators.... Each of the separators can be a null string (i.e., nothing) or a sequewnce of characters to up to length eight. These separators can be specified in the WHAT Initialization file.
  
  
• A few small changes were made to OWL3defs.txt. Several instances of double space characters were changed to a single space. The new-in-OWL3 GENLOCK was changed from a noun to a verb, based on the OWL3 list, although it is a noun in OSPD5. The most recent version of OWL3defs.txt is dated 2016-7-26; menu pick Help->About... to see which version you are using.

Version 2.1 Release 95 made 17-Sep-15

• The new Collins 2015 Lexicon (known as CSW2015) is now included as one of the lexicons which comes with the full installation of WHAT. There is no definitions file for this lexicon. When the full installation is done, a desktop shortcut is created for running WHAT with that lexicon, using CSW0212 as a secondary lexicon.
  
  
• When playing the 15 x 15 or 21 x 21 game and recording a game between two opponents, WHAT provides the players' racks. When the first rack is presented and then the user requests seeing the possible moves by clicking on the Show Move Choices button, the user can select any of those choices and then press the Enter key to make the selected move. The bug which was present, and is now fixed, was then showing the game starting at the game start, rather than after the first move. This bug might have been introduced in Release 94 when the first described bug was fixed.
  
  
• The activity of trimming the workspace, as requested using the /TW command now eliminates lines which contain only " (nothing)".
  
  
• Problems with WHAT's staying aware of the kinds of items on the slate and in wordlists have been fixed. A bug which demonstrated incorrect behavior was to request anagrams of OP and then save the slate to a wordlist; next, restore the wordlist to the slate; finally, present the slate, and PO, the new two, should have been suffixed with a plus sign, but WHAT was incorrectly thinking the slate contents were strings and not words, and so the plus was missing.
  
  
• When changing lexicons, WHAT should update the item in the Word Source box on the Query tab at the left of the WHAT window. The first item in the pull-down list is the current lexicon, and the program had a bug in that the first item was not getting updated right away. This is now fixed.
  
  
• A few changes were made to capture some activities to restart the WHAT internal timer which is used at the user's request to revert to bring up the Challenge Dialog. Unfortunately, it is not possible (or too difficult) for WHAT to notice the activity of scrolling the workspace.
  
  
• The incorrect definition of SUMI in OWL3defs.txt was fixed. The OWL3defs.txt file had an incorrect definition for CAPE and was fixed. A tab was missing from the line. There was a WHAT bug which caused a crash when that line was read as part of definition search filtering, such as with this command:
  /"animal" *#
  WHAT was fixed to be more robust.

Version 2.1 Release 94 made 16-Jul-15

• This release fixes a bug which was introduced in Release 91 and not noticed until recently. When reading and showing a game there was a problem when the game start is to be shown. This is what usually is done when a .gcg file is read. The Game Start line of the history was correctly selected, but what was shown on the board and in the rack was the state of the game after the end of the first move.
  
  
• WHAT had been failing to correctly note giving the going-out player a correct bonus of two times the value of the opponent's rack. This has been fixed.
• A bug was fixed which was causing the Show Move Choices button to become invisible when switching from the activity of showing a game to the activity of playing moves when that game was one which had an end-of-game command.
  
  
• Planned but incomplete support of a pop-up menu by right-clicking the cursor was removed from the Board Dialog.
  
  
• These new document files were introduced:
  • what_with_scrabble.html, and
  • what_about_boggle.html.

  Version 2.1 Release 93 made 30-Jun-15

  WHAT is now denoted as Version 2.1. The main new feature introduced is the support of the 21 x 21 Board Game, also known as Super Scrabble®. The

  WHAT user guide has yet to be updated to describe how to use SCRABBLE® and Super Scrabble®. See the menu picks in the Tools menu.

  • The Word Judge 2 (WJ2) Lexicon is now supported, along with definitions. The lexicon is exceedingly close to the OWL3 Lexicon, which is not yet available to the public. Words in WJ2 are of lengths 2 through 21, so this lexicon can be used when playing Super Scrabble®.
  • Most of the WHAT documents have been updated. Most significantly, the documents "WHAT Examples" and "What Me Study" have been updated to use the OWL3 Lexicon. They had been written for OWL1 and were never updated for OWL2, so this has been long overdue. A couple of examples with long words in the first of these documents use the WJ2 Lexicon.
  • Set (P) is now supported as having the 196 tiles in a bag of Super Scrabble®. It is supported in the same way that set (B) is. See the Sets tab in the upper right of the WHAT screen.
  • Commands to perform the importing of boards or grids for the various games supported in WHAT are now of the form /F<number>B. The <number> is:
    •  5 - for the 5 x 5 Game,
    • 15 - for the 15 x 15 Game,
    • 21 - for the 21 x 21 Game,
    • 12 - for the Word-Building Game.
  • /F<number>G is used to read recorded games, where <number> is either 15 or 21.
  • A couple of bugs were fixed in the area of creating user-defined sets. WHAT had been failing when trying to copy set 2 from set 1. Also, once there are at least two user-defined sets, WHAT was having a problem enabling an inactive window when you try to select a user-defined set to copy.
  • There was a bug when augmenting a query with a word-based set. If you select on the Query tab the button labelled "Letter / Blank / Set" and then select the tab labelled "Word-based Set" you are given two choices for forming a set. The second option had a bug in that if you specify two letters and click the OK button, only those letters are shown within parentheses; a question mark should have been included also, and this has been fixed.
  • The similar tab within the dialog to create a set was also faulty in that a created command had a couple of problems; if you provided aa, the created command was /1U=((aa)(null). This problem has been fixed.
  • When defining a specified set, there is now a new option to set the counts to a maximum of 1 for those counts which are greater than 1. This may prove helpful in developing anamonics.
  • There was a bug which has been fixed in performing a query such as A(+)/QS. The expected result is 25 2-letter strings: AB, AC, AD, etc. Before the bug was fixed there were two incorrect strings included in the results: A[ and A\. The bug had been introduced when Spanish support was added to WHAT in 2009.
  • When using the FISE09 Spanish lexicon, the query Ñ. had been showing three words with the second letter not green (to indicate it is a blank). This has been fixed.
  • There was a bug which set WHAT into oblivion, but it has been fixed. When using a lexicon with long words. These two commands demonstrated the bug: *# and []/2P. The second command requests the query kind of two-word patterns.

  Version 2.1 Release 92 made 9-Apr-15

  • When using the /NR in a command to read the Next flashcard and Rewind, WHAT had been stopping flashcarding on the second-last word read from the wordlist. This has been fixed, so that it stops after the final word of the wordlist.
  • When solving for words in the 5 x 5 Word Game, allow for the shortest words to be of length 3 instead of length 4. Wanting to see words which are this short can be helpful when learning new words which are being added in a new lexicon. By default the shortest words shown when presenting output from the /B command are of length 5, but you can request shorter words to be shown, for example, by including this filter subcommand: /|3.
  • Setting the canonical order wuing the /; command from within a command file was not having an effect. This has been fixed.
  • The "Are you sure" dialog which shows up when you try to clear the workspace or other parts of WHAT from the WHAT tab at the upper right of the WHAT window was not being presented well; some of the text was not readable. This has been fixed.
  • WHAT had been crashing when performing two-word anagramming with a very long string, such as OXYPHENBUTAZONEMICROTECHNIQUES, and this has been fixed.
  • The WHAT User Guide has been edited to correct problems with the numbering of sections near the end of the document. The description of how to turn on lexicon transition mode using a command line switch is now described. Also, when that mode is in effect, the color of the challenge dialog is fuchsia and not the usual aqua.

  Version 2.1 Release 91 made 2-Feb-15

  Since the release of Version 1.2 (90) was made 11-Jun-11, many changes were made to the program in 3 1/2 years. We may have lost track of all changes, but these are what we can offer as Version 2.0 (91) is made public.
  • WHAT has been changed from a sold product requiring authorization to a free program. Rather than charging for the program, we hope satisfied users will see fit to make donations which will help in providing support for and enhancements to the program.
  • The method of providing the installation has been made easier with just one .msi file to be downloaded and run.
  • The availability of individual files for updating an existing WHAT installation has been changed to support placing files into Program Files subdirectories on present-day Windows systems, such as Windows 7. Administrator privileges are needed, and the desination directory is expected to be a subdirectory of C:\Program Files (x86); a user may change this when the self-extracting .zip file is unzipped.
  • The substantial additional features to support setting up tiles and making plays on a SCRABBLE board is now available. Documentation of these new features has yet to be done, but we did not want to delay releasing the new WHAT. To see these features either menu-pick Tools->15 x 15 Game... or enter the single letter command P, which stands for Play. .
  • The choice for vowels has been missing from the dialog to define a new set on the first tab, and it has been returned.
  • /S ! to set steals for the long-term had not been recognized. When 2-word patterns is selected as the Query Kind in Query Kind box, /2A was shown in the workspace. Then if an exclamation point is appended, there is confusion. /2A parses as two-word patterns.
  • When the GUI is used to specify query kinds and presentation kinds, the command put in the workspace was sometimes being suffixed with a space, and this was making it difficult to make that specification long-term. Those suffixed spaces are no longer emitted.
  • The command /Y1=6 was not being recognized as a command to copy a wordlist. The command scanner had to be fixed.
  • Many dialogs were not being displayed well. Several pixel adjustments were made in many dialogs. The Help dialog was changed so its background color is now lime green.
  • The .ini (WHAT initialization) file can include settings for the WHAT timer: timer and warning periods, sound wave files used, and whether the warning sounding is enabled. The dialog to select a different sound wave file has been improved.
  • WHAT now supports setting options for working with the 5 x 5 Grid Game. You can edit these options by clicking on the (new) Edit Options button in the dialog. The new options are:
    • a minimum length for words found in the grid - default is 5
    • an option whether to also allow shorter new words to be included when solving a grid; a new word is one found in the primary lexicon and not in the secondary lexicon - the default is YES.
    • Scores to be word according to their word length - default is Fibonacci scoring.
    Settings for these options are now specifiable in the .ini (WHAT initialization) file. The .ini file can also now have specifications of Big Boggle® cube arrangements, which can include a cube with digrams. Boggle® solving was enhanced to allow for digrams other than Qu.
  • Parsing a WHAT command like /Y1=2+ was sending the program into a loop. This has been fixed so the plus sign is reported as an incorrect character.
  • When reading wordlist files, leading and trailing spaces and tabs on each line are ignored. Until this was fixed, a word with a trailing space was not matched to the same word in a another wordlist, such as when taking the difference of the lists (e.g. /Y3=1-2).