On 6/7/24 11:53, Jonathan Scott wrote:
Compatibility is critically important.
.
Thanks for your reply. I'm hardly surprised that it
mentions "compatibility".
And I'm astonished that the behavior had been institutionalized
in macros etc. before it surfaced as a problem. And dismayed
that the resolution was to delete the "-" rather than to report a
syntax error. Either is a behavior change.
We looked into the old problem of negative SETA values being
substituted without a sign long ago, but rapidly identified some
internal cases where including the minus sign would break
existing macro code. The SIGNED built-in function was
introduced as a partial workaround.
.
That seems a more orderly approach than FLAGS or COMPAT--
less impact on existing code. Some programmers might
use SETA and SETC interchangeably. Can SIGNED be used
on a SETC symbol?
...
However, if common product-related macros may be relying on the
lack of a sign, changing the results could cause problems. For
this reason, I think it would be better to implement the FLAG
option first, so that we can get an idea of how common this
problem might be before we decide whether to provide the option
to fix it.
--
Thanks again,
gil
