Bug: A really insidious browse bug...

[John Esak]

Well, remember I pointed out an obscure bug you could run into if you use
the old Guru Magazine article I did a hundred years ago about building
browses in variables and then concatenating the b= var & var & var
method....

Well, I found something today that drove me completely nuts... For about an
hour.  

If on the lookup line, which looks something like this...

Lookup alias=file k=(key) i=A -nl b=(b_cfg & b_hdr & b_data)

You mistakenly do this:

Lookup alias=file k=(key) i=A -nl b=(b_cfg & b_hdr & b_data)
*56"

And I did this because I usually copy the original browse several times and
break it into the 3 vars.  It's just an easy way to change a browse that is
already written with the browse wizard.  Anyway, the *56"  was hung out way,
way past the 80th character on the screen... Meaning OUT OF SITE!!!!  And
the syntax checker did NOT catch it!!!!!  (Really, it probably shouldn't be
looking past a complete lookup... I don't blame the syntax checker.... But
still, it is something to look for if ever you run into unfigure-outable
problems.)

Man, I typed in the lines of the browse over and over again... Thinking I
had some wired invisible character or who knows.  The symptom was a skinny,
minny 1 character wide window... With the highlight bar visible but nothing
else of course... Ho much can you show in 1 character? :-)

So, for you Ray, at FpTech... I'm not sure this could be classified as a
bug... Because FpTech doesn't suggest or maybe even support breaking the
browse into variables... But you *have* to do it for those which need to
take up the whole screen with lots of fields... Otherwise the browse wizard
truncates the 2nd line and doubles the quote... Something I have sent to
tech support several times over 10 years ago and maybe even more recently.
Obviously, not much you can do, but maybe Ken will want to run his parser
*past* a completed browse for any "hangouts* which might be past the human
visible edge of the screen.  Actually, I don't know what made me even look
over there, I did by accident and ended the hour of torture. :-)

For the rest of you... Beware of this time waster!

Everyone have a nice beginning of December! I missed the back from
Thanksgiving thread... Let's all hope the new year brings back the economy.
It's funny, gas is now down to $1.80 a gallon and it's almost unnoticed or
unmentioned by anyone.... But boy it helps, huh?  Now, if I could only sell
an unwanted house!  :-)

John Esak