help

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra at baylink.com>
To: <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Sent: Friday, November 09, 2007 3:19 PM
Subject: Re: help


> On Fri, Nov 09, 2007 at 03:10:55PM -0500, Laura Brody wrote:
>> Quoting "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra at baylink.com>:
>> > You're working with base 36 integers.  I assume you're using the
>> > traditional increment approach where:
>> >
>> > 08..09..0a..0b...0y..0z..10..11...19..1a.... ?
>> >
>> > There's no native method of dealing with base-36 numbers in filepro,
>>
>>   **BZZZZT** Wrong! Thanks for playing .....
>>
>> Page 32 of Laura's Quick Reference Guide for filePro v5.0 says:
>>
>>    v4.5 BASE() Returns the value of numb in the numeric base result_base
>> ("2"-"36")
>>     n=BASE(n,num_base,[result_base])
>>     The third parameter is optional, if omitted, the default is "10".
>
> So you can translate from your b-36 back to b-10, increment, and then
> translate back.  Nice.  Forgot that was in there.  Nice that it goes up
> to 36, too, and anyone who ever wondered why *that* limit?  This is why.

Base36 is handy for squeasing more data into small containers too like bar 
codes with not much room for very many characters, without having to move to 
a real encoding/compression algorithm.

Brian K. White    brian at aljex.com    http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR
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