Just a routine, later it would be called script, to which you pass a number and it returns it as words, as for checks or invoices. For example, slovima(1234.56) would return jednahiljadadvestotinetridesetčetiri 56/100 (onethousandtwohundredthirtyfour 56/100).
It was first developed by Sale and Grgi even before DBA.
At the fair 1989, Grgi told me, he had a visitor at the booth, who was a cobol programmer, who had such a routine. The dialog was, by reconstruction, something like this
- I have this routine which returns number as words, in a string
- So have we
- I wrote it in cobol
- We wrote ours in fox
- It took me five months to write
- It took us almost two weeks
- It has two thousand lines
- Ours has about two hundred lines
And the poor guy was looking for a customer for his code...
After about 1990, when I saw they lost interest in maintaining it, I took over and fixed the few bugs it had. Not that it would ever error out, it was foolproof, it's just that it didn't always quite respect the grammar. And when the 2nd wave of inflation hit, I had to make it handle millions, milliards, billions (american millions, billions, trillions). Then after some denomination, the parts of dinar were made important again, so I had to add the number of decimals to show after the text.
About 1992 I think it was when Sale decided we've milked it long enough and that we could just release it to the public. So I posted it on sezam and it got downloaded many times. Škrba published a script for Excel, I think, which was based on this (don't know who ported it), about the same time. A dozen years later, I found it as an add-on for OpenOffice and later LibreOffice. Even the variable names were still the same. The names and comments, however, were gone.
28-II-2020 - 12-VIII-2023