Learning to Program

Making Software Useful (and Reusable) with Input

You might recall that we ran into this problem in Chapter 1, “‘Hello, World!’ Writing Your First Program.” At first, your web page only greeted you (alert('Hello, Steven!');, remember?). You included input to your program by adding the prompt code. Admittedly, kittenbook is still not that useful, but at least now it can greet anyone.

Let’s look back at the Microsoft Word example. How can the code be changed to open any file instead of just Intro.docx? We need input! In the prompt example, we knew just where the input was coming from: the prompt. But you can open a Word file in several different ways, and you don’t want to have to rewrite your code for each of these situations. We will create a ...