Sowinski, Richard J. wrote: >What I see happen when you have control characters in Globals is that when >you try to display the global, it reeks havoc with your screen.
This is an issue with your display device and user interface (or lack of one) when working with roll-and-scroll on dumb terminals. We addressed this issue in VMACS over 20 years ago by taking over display management and using tools for development that render the control codes displayable. Unfortunately, it is not easy to adopt such a solution in small steps... There is a nearly identical problem in working with web applications where data may contain angle brackets and other character that are like control characters in HTML. In order to maintain the integrity of dynamically generated web pages, you have to use tools that filter out such characters when they would break the display or take it out of the intended control of your applications. M2Web includes some powerful tools for handling this sort of thing. >I have seen M applications written specifically with control characters in >the globals to be executed later. A highly efficient technique for generating and working with forms on dumb terminals is to compile all the fixed parts into strings with the controls embedded so that at run time you simply write the strings to paint the forms. All graphic renditions such as bold, reverse, colors, etc and cursor positioning etc are taken care of ahead of time so it's very simple and fast when interacting with the users. --------------------------------------- Jim Self Systems Architect, Lead Developer VMTH Computer Services, UC Davis (http://www.vmth.ucdavis.edu/us/jaself) ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list Hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
