Robots are recordings of question and answer sessions between users and computers. These recordings are able to be played back, while actually repeating the internal executions of the program statements. However, the real benefits of robots are their tutorial aspects and flexible control of their executions.

To record, the questions and answers are written to unit 60, including the pixel positions of the mouse click and the discriptions of the options being clicked.

To play back, the robots are read from unit 50, with answer displayed in yellow and allowed to be modified by typing in the new answer, or just accept it as default by pressing the [Enter] key.

For tutorial, a new user should go through the pertinent robot by keeping on pressing the [Enter] key. When he becomes familiar with how the problem is modelled, he can generate the robot for his own problem by executing the existing robot but making changes accordingly.

For modification, a user can jump to the the particular component to be modified, as a robot is divided into many components that can be processed individually. Once the modification is done, he can order the robot to go through the rest of the execution by itself by clicking the right mouse button, but still reserve the ability to pause it by clicking the particular question and answer display.

Some times a user can be out of step with the robot. In that case, he can still salvage as much information in the robot as possible by using some control commands. These commands are prefixed by the symbol, "$", followed by an alphabet or 3-alphabet string. "$d" asks the robot control mechanism to search down for the next occurence of the same question. "$u" means search upward. There are other commands that can be displayed out with the command "$how".

In actual programming, the robotic aspects are taken cared of automatically by the Fortran subroutines that do question and answer processing and menu selection. These subroutines are listed and described below:

QUEREA=question with real answer
QUEINT=question with integer answer
QUEALP=question with alphanumeric answer
QUESTA=question with statement answer
QUESTC=question with capitalized statement
QUECOM=question for component description
QUEPRO=question for problem description
QUEDRA=question for drawing graphics
QUEDRF=question for drawing figures
QUEYES=question on yes/no answer
WRISTA=write statements
WRILIN=write a line of statement
WRIMES=write a message with title

Software robots are the communicators among all users and computers. Now we dont need to pass information by words of mouth or letters of pen and paper. Just leave a working software robot there when the job is done and the information is at everybody's finger tip. Furthermore, what's communicated are finished product, with air-tight documentation, rather than glut of instructions.

Software robots are out to automate the world.