rclerk @once

[Brian K. White]

On 7/20/2017 4:14 PM, Scott Walker via Filepro-list wrote:
> Brian,
>
> According to Laura's Quick Reference Guide for filePro version 5.0 2nd
> edition
>
> @ONCE processing does come before @MENU and @UPDATE
>
> She has a great Inquire/Update/Add flowchart showing the order of things
> getting executed.
>
> If Laura gives me permission I would be glad to scan it and post it here,
> but I would need her permission.
>
> Her Quick Reference Guide is worth is weight in gold.

Thanks for that info. We have her help files, maybe we have that too and 
I just have to look around.

And if it's as you say, then "Houston we gots a problem", because it 
absolutely does not happen as claimed.


Not that I'll ever see any correction, because I'm on 5.0.14 and will 
not be moving past that version, and they certainly will not be issuing 
any bug fixes to it.

So I've worked around it with a couple of ugly "if did_init ne Y then 
gosub _init" at the top of both @menu and @update.

Even the workaround is crap because it relies on did_init not being Y on 
entering the table. Technically, you are not supposed to just assume 
that fp had initialized all variables to null. You are supposed to 
initialize them yourself before using them to make any decisions, and 
the best place for that is @once, but since I have to use a variable to 
emulate the very behavior of @once itself...

It's an exceedingly fine point. It actually works fine, because a 
variable generally IS initialized empty by fp. It's just technically not 
right to actually rely on that assumption.

> By the way,  thanks so much for your post about the libtermcap.so.2 you use.
> It very much helped me today.

Our pleasure. Fairlite put that rpm together, and that repo and server, 
that we're using in production in the end. I don't know if he submitted 
the fixes back upstream or not, but if not, I intend to sooner or later 
myself, so eventually no one should need any special home made rpm. I 
just haven't touched our migrate-to-centos project recently.

-- 
bkw