I think this should generate a syntax error...whatdoeseveryoneelse think?

[Jean-Pierre A. Radley]

Bruce Easton propounded (on Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 07:16:46PM -0500):
| 
| Ken - but we are winding up with no data for such a field that has been
| completely blanked out.  And we said yes to shrink the file, so wouldn't it
| stand to reason that there is no longer any purpose for the map placeholder
| for the field?  F3/F4 makes sense to me because you are providing it as a
| useful tool inside ddefine independent of restructuring - so I understand
| the protection built in to keep it useful for files with no data.  But I
| would think restructuring could include a clean-up of map fields that no
| longer have a purpose and where data is being eliminated as part of the
| restructure.

Say we have a customer database that's been in use for many years, with
all sorts of fields for the main address, the shipping address, main
telephone and fax numbers and several other departmental numbers, credit
limits, sales for the last few years, contact names, our salesman number
-- who knows: could easily be over a hundred fields.

One day we notice that we still have a field for their telex number.
Gosh, who needs that anymore, let's zap it.  We do NOT want to eliminate
it in the field number sequence, since that would mean that every
references to any higher-numbered field, wherever they occur in screens,
reports, processing, selection sets, indices, goes off-by-one.  Who
needs the headache of fine-comb-editing the entire database's files?
Even hairier: we'd have to find every lookup made into the customer
database all over the .../filepro/xxxx directories.  Ugh -- stomping
the critter to zero length is enough of a sentence of doom.  Lets not
re-write history by trying to eliminate all traces of it, t'ain't worth
it!

Maybe next week you'll have occasion to add a field for eligibility for
shared advertising.  You could then recycle that zero-length field and
no longer have it as any kind of eyesore.

-- 
JP
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