Re: [Hardhats-members] Protecting against indirection errors.

[Greg Kreis]

On calling ^DIM, while it would protect most types of errors if used properly (unless the indirected statement had indirection in it ;-), would be really slow for any significant volume of calls. It is a MUMPS syntax parser written in MUMPS. This is the danger of dynamic, late binding unless you want to go to compile or on-the-fly compiling.  But hey, along with the danger comes the great flexibility.  Do you want to have your cake and eat it to?  ;-)   ;-) Kevin Toppenberg wrote: See below On 2/11/06, Jim Self <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Kevin, What do you want to happen when the error is detected? I would want the function to have a chance to return a 'failure' value. Your third example would give a syntax error. I would expect this to be a programming error. Not really. In my debugger program, I have the ability, while stepping through the program, to dump out arrays. My array-display function takes a variable name (similar to the pRef in my example). It has been working well, until I accidentally passed it an invalid reference. In my work, it seems that the standard error response of logging the error and halting (or dropping back to the MUMPS shell) is generally the best way to handle these kinds of errors, unless you can catch them much earlier (composition rather than use of the construct). If pRef is expected to be a literal global reference then a function to check its syntax would be pretty easy to write. In my case, it is supposed to be anything the user wants it to be, and it is the job of the function to screen out erroneous input. Thanks Kevin ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=k&kid3432&bid#0486&dat1642 _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list Hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members