I think this should generate a syntax error... what does everyone else think?

[John Esak]

Today this bit me... not hard... but enought to make me grumble.

I'm betting Ken has a good reason, but I'm hoping not... :-)

I had mistenly type in a huge series of lines...

          if: 109 eq "0"
        then: 009=""

Of course, I meant it to be 109.  No syntax error... I've been running this
program for about 20 years. The field is on a long series of screens and I
don't want ".00" shwoing in them if the ield is showing that, I want it to
be blank. I must have never checked... but this one fiels always remeined at
.00 while all the others cleared nicely. (Figures that no user would ever
even mention it. :-) To them a blank and .00 are essentially the same I
guess. Okay, to a point they are, but not on a report where there is a
glaring difference.  Anyway, should this not have rroduced a syntax error.

I didn't notice becaue my field 9 in this file is 0 length. Never saw
anything get clobbered.

Actually, maybe even if it is seen that a 0 length real field is being
assigned a value... that should generate a syntax error also... Okay, not a
syntax error, but a warning when the table is sotred. How about that.

Also, while we are at it. I just tried assigning to field 229 when it
doesn't exist. No error, no warning. I think this would be helpful to...

John

P.S. - I'm not so sure how I feel about getting a warning about assigning to
fields that don't exist yet.... I may know I'm going to create them
later.... But warning about assigning to a zero lenght field would be good,
and certainly warnig that there is no such field as 009  would be good.
Okay I'm waitig to hear the bad nws that there really is a field 009....
because, I did try it and it did put a value into field 9 when I worte:


      then: 009="14"

Hmmm...

John