SYMPTOMS Your Health is, or claims to be. an expert medical system to nm on your Spectrum (or Amstrad). This is odd enough, but odder stiU is the fact that it comes from Hisoft, creators of high quahty machine code programming tools to the computer gentry. It is not, of course, anything like a full expert system. What it is more than anything is a guide to a healthy diet. The subject is divided up into various sections selected from a centrai menu. You can under go a simple question and answer session on any symptoms you might have -however. the section of the program is only concemed with symptons related to lack of essential diet ingredients, so it's of limited use. More impressive is an option to have your weekly diet checked. You are presented with a series of lists of food and must check off each one that features in your diet and indicate the quantity consumed. The computer then analyses the results in terms of calories, protems, vita-mins , minerate, sugars, fibre, fat and other elements and comes to a conclusion about how good a diet you have. It works quite impressively and might be genuinely useful -but would you want to run it twice? I think this is a reasonable program albeit with a some-what misleading title (which matters more in 'serious' programs than it might elsewhere) but I'm not sure that anyone would be weU ad-vised to buy it - how often would you use it? Popular Computing Weekly |