addslashes

[John Esak]

Quick true story about EDITS being able to do virtually anything... :-)

I showed Karen's brother a long time ago how to do an edit... In fact, it
was after I gave him a bunch of Model 16's and Wyse 50 terminals.  No, I
didn't tell him I had paid $4k each for the 16's and hundreds of dollars
each for the Wyse's :-()  Just set him up with that whole system and had him
buy Profile 16 Plus. I then started him off by showing him a lot of the
basics, and he took off from there. He wrote a whole system to run his
restaurant/bar (The Temperencevile tavern for those Ptissburgher's among
you).  I was very, very impressed at how quickly he took to filePro.  But
then, that as we all know, is its true beauty and prime usability
strength... Almost anyone who has the desire to learn it, can.  So anyway,
he calls me up one day and says, "How do I get more edits?"  I had shown him
that he could make an edit that changed 3t into 3 tablespoons, and 4z into 4
ounces... And such, all so he could enter in his various recipes for the
things they made there.  I showed him also how to join lines together to
build more complex edits.  When I asked him how he could possibly have used
up close to 200 edits... He showed me the "recipe" edit... It had every
possible transformation for teaspoons, tablespoons, ounces, dollops, drips,
drabs, pinches, etc., etc.  It was really funny. But of course it worked for
him until he got to the maximum allowed edit space. :-)  

Of course, I took all of his 200 line edit and turned it into a filePro
lookup table which did all he wanted it to do and more.  He liked the lookup
thingy even more than edits. :-)

Strangely enough though I think the processing bkw put up for the conversion
of all the punctuation to add a \ or whatever was very good filePro code.
(And I don't say that about all the code that goes up here... ) I did
roughly the same thing again with a lookup table.  I actually did try it
once with an edit, but was flat lined when I hit the one drawback I can
think of to edits, which is it won't deal with quotes ("). 

All in all though, if you can accomplish something just by leaving a field
and letting filePro handle it internally with no user processing, that I
would think would always be the way to go. 

John

P.S. - Incidentally, the limit of 200 (or so :-) edits is very much that a
LIMIT.  I've hit it a dozen or so times in 30 years of filePro'ing, and as
we all know it throw up the weirdest errors imaginable. It is always rather
inscrutable until something way in the back of your brain says... Check how
many edits there are... And there it is an overflow amongst local and global
and system edits.

I think if this limit were ever increased... Even just to the next power of
2, a whole new style of filePro programming might emerge. But then, the
Bob's of the world would never learn about "lookups"!  :-)




> -----Original Message-----
> From: filepro-list-bounces+john=valar.com at lists.celestial.com 
> [mailto:filepro-list-bounces+john=valar.com at lists.celestial.co
> m] On Behalf Of Fairlight
> Sent: Thursday, August 26, 2010 1:45 PM
> To: filepro-list at lists.celestial.com
> Subject: Re: addslashes
> 
> You'll never BELIEVE what Kenneth Brody said here...:
> > (Why don't people start with "gee, can this be done with an edit"?)
> 
> Because regex and extended regex are standard, and my brain 
> only has the
> patience to focus on one set of line noise and accomopanying 
> semantic rules
> at a time.  :)
> 
> mark->
> -- 
> Audio panton, cogito singularis.
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