filepro quirk

[Fairlight]

Four score and seven years--eh, screw that!
At about Thu, Oct 28, 2004 at 05:33:51PM -0700,
Jeff Harrison blabbed on about:
> 
> There is the compare function for the unequivical
> compare.  Also, if you are always comparing the same
> number of characters there is no problem.  i.e. if two
> fields are defined as the same length and you are
> comparing the two, or if you include the correct
> number of spaces in your literal compare.

Well, that explains my ignorance.  Actually, only partly--I think someone's
mentioned this before but it didn't stick in long-term memory.  But compare
was added in 4.5, and I stopped serious development in-house for my last
external employer when fP was still at 4.1.  I've done things since then
and caught up more or less--this is one of those cases where it's on the
"less" side.  :)

I do note that the docs I just looked at said "with case sensitivity".
They don't go on to elaborate on whether the string lengths matter.  Based
on the trinary nature of the return value, however, it looks like it works
much like perl's "cmp" operand, and should actually give the desired
results.

Thanks for the clue, Jeff.  I'll try and actually remember it this time
around.  I now remember even more of the conversation, since it got into
not being able to use it as a test value in an If: line--I believe Ken said
only functions that returned boolean values could be used directly in that
fashion.  Compare not being a boolean function, it requires an extra line
of code, I believe--assuming I'm remembering the rest of what we talked
about before correctly.

Sorry to anyone that thought I was dragging up another already-dead issue.
I seriously didn't remember that conversatin until Jeff jogged my memory.

mark->
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