DIMension syntax checking...

[Bob Stockler]

John Esak wrote (on Tue, Feb 07, 2006 at 01:38:09AM -0500):

| 
| Recently, I spent an hour trying to debug something that wasn't working,
| when all I did was copy a large chunk of code and modiry it a little bit. I
| made a typo when doing this and the syntax check didn't find it, so I kept
| overlooking and not seeing the problem.
| 
| This probably relates to the fact that you can write lots of filePro code in
| lots of ways and it still passes syntax check. I suppose this is because
| filePro wants to allow for varying styles *within* strict syntax.... such
| as:
| 
|      then: show("12","3") "blah" and show ("12","3") "blah"
| 
| are equivalent and pass syntax check. Fine, no problem. however, when I
| copied the code today (that's how "recently" it was) I copied:
| 
|      dim date["3"]:bal(143);  dim pay["3"]:bal(50)
| 
| (and a whole bunch of other arrays like these...)
| 
| Then I went to the newly copied arrays, changed the overlay field, and and
| pressed F1 at all the appropriate places to turned the lines into:
| 
|      dim date2["3"]:bal(160);  dim pay2["3"]:bal(60)
| 
| In other words I pressed F1 and "inserted" a 2 on all the array names.
| Okay, everything should work fine, right. It did, except that it showed we
| had an a/r of 5,895,233.23 instead of 41,610.23... :-)  A teeny-tiny
| difference which my brilliant brain noticed immediately. :-)  Anyway, an
| hour later after scrutinizing all the arrays, I finally asked Rick to go
| over them because it just wasn't jumping out at me... What he saw... again
| after a good 15 minutes of scrutinizing was one of the array lines looked
| like this:
| 
|      dim date2["3"]:bal(160);  dim pay ["3"]:bal(60)

If you had used my Perl program "ck.syn" (aka "ck.table") on the
table it would have reported:

  Line:  xxx - Array Name "pay " contains illegal character(s).

The illegal character, of course, being a space.

Bob

| Now, assuredly, you are seeing the problem right away. I'm thinking/hoping
| this is because this little nippet is not inside a much larger group of code
| that all looks just about excatly like this.  Anyway, I'll take the lumps
| for not catching it right away... but shouldn't the syntax checker have
| helped along with this?  Why would it see pay ["3"]...  the same way it
| would see pay["3"]...  Isn't this a different enough thing than show (r,c)
| and show(r,c)?
| 
| Obviously, what I did as I was mechanically going along and changing all the
| array names... was press F1 and insert the 2, but the 2 didn't get pressed
| hard enough or whatever and I just missed it. My vote is that the syntax
| checker should compalin about this. If for no other reason than to support
| good form... and help poor programmers like me from wasting an hour with
| code that can never work properly.
| 
| Just food for thought. I know there are hundreds of more important things to
| see attention than this minor change to how things work now.  Besides, I
| realize there are probably people out there who *want* it to work the way it
| does not... but I would still argue for my view on this.
| --
| John Esak
| (570) 384-2444
| 
| Author of:
| The filePro Survivor Series
| Complete Video Training For filePro On CD
| See samples at: www.valar.com
| 
| 
| 
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-- 
Bob Stockler  +-+  bob at trebor.iglou.com  +-+  http://members.iglou.com/trebor
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