REVMEDIA Revisited

Published ByDateVersionKnowledge LevelKeywords
Sprezzatura Ltd01 DEC 19912.1+EXPERT!INDEXING, @FMC, RTP19, @ATRBT, @ATRBT.PTR, COLORS.TABLE, @CURSORS, SELECT.CONSTANTS, INCLUDE, BTREE.EXTRACT

To ensure that your documentation is as up to date as possible we continue our occasional series intended to bring previous REVMEDIA articles into line with release 2.1 of AREV. My thanks to all subscribers who have helped by notifying me of bugs or discrepancies.

Volume 2 Issue 1

PageDescription
3Scaled masked decimal conversions no longer hang.
4The discussion re: indexing needs to be amended to take into account the fact that the !INDEXING file is no longer used and that the index transaction data is written directly to the !datafile. Basically records keyed on an integer are written to the !datafile and these are subsequently written out to records keyed on the index name and an integer and thence to the index itself.
8The reference to DATA_RECORD in REORDER: should be to DR
9An interesting fact to bear in mind when dealing with @variables is that the compiler recognises @variables as such when compiling and thus takes anything immediately after the @variable (but not separated by a semi colon etc) as a formatting command. Due to this it has been incorrectly suggested that certain @variables exist when they in fact do not. A case in point would be @FMC.

If a program were written saying simply PRINT @FMC then it would compile. However if it were subsequently run, it would fall over with an RTP19 error. This is because the compiler recognises the @FM and assumes that the following C must be an implicit formatting command. It therefore calls RTP19 passing it C which has not been assigned. The veracity of this may be simply tested by the following
C = "R(0)#10"
print @FMC


@ATTRBT should be spelt @ATRBT
@ATTRBT.PTR should be spelt @ATRBT.PTR
Any occurrence of ? is now left alone in COLORS.TABLE but any occurrence of ! is replaced with a CHAR(127). Thus a colour definition might be C!1 on file but would be stored in @ATRBT as CHAR(27) : "C" : CHAR(127) : "1".

11The full structure of the @CURSORS dimensioned array is described in the INCLUDE record SELECT.CONSTANTS on lines 78 through 92. This complements the existing documentation.

As of 2.1 it is still necessary to remove stopped words from lookups before calling BTREE.EXTRACT.

(Volume 3, Issue 7, Page 4)