Assignments to uncast dummy fields (was Re: simple

[Bruce Easton]

(response inline)
Larry S. Weaver Jr. wrote Friday, February 15, 2008 2:30 PM:

[..]
> You can also force it to treat a number as a text string by doing a text 
> function on it.
> 
> yy(2,.0)="15"
> 
> xx=yy{"" gives "15" with a field edit of (2,*)
> 
> I then tried to trip it up by doing both with unexpected results:
> 
> yy(2,.0)="15"
> xx=yy{""+"3" gave "153" with a field edit of (3,*)
> xx=yy{""-"3" gave "15-3" with a field edit of (4,*)
> xx=yy{""*"3" gave "150" with a field edit of (3,*), as did xx=yy{""/"3"

It seems in each of the cases above, yy and the last part of 
the assignment are all treated numerically, prior to
appending of strings, that is

yy = 15
""+"3" = 3
""-"3" = -3
""*"3" and ""/"3"  = 0, 

so I'm guessing that filepro assumes the operand "" 
before the numeric operator is zero.
If that's true, then I would think it would not 
matter if the final result field were text or numeric - 
since the only (outer-most) operation left to do is "{", 
and therefore concatenation is expected.

> 
> (all with filepro 5.0.09)
> 
> Not that any of those have any real use, but it just goes to show there 
> are some mysterious things going on under the hood.
> 
> Larry, Jr.

Bruce

Bruce Easton
STN, Inc.