1. RE: booleans
I treat all variable names as 'holders' of a sort.
They dont actually hold anything untill you give them something to hold.
If i understand you correctly, your looking for a method to
check if the variable has been assigned a value yet within the
program. For some reason or another, the syntax checker does
this, but there isnt a user function to do this. That said,
i would also say you might try initializing all your variables
if you are in the habit of testing their state very often.
A sequence would therefore be initialized with ""
and an atom or integer with a 0 (numerical zero).
Ive run into this kind of thing a lot too, and that got me into the
habit of intializing a lot of my variables early on in the program
with the null value for that kind of variable so that testing later
doesnt produce a run time error in any case.
For objects you will have to decide what to use as an intializer.
Good luck with it.
--Al
2. RE: booleans
On 5 Feb 2001, at 1:07, Al Getz wrote:
> A sequence would therefore be initialized with ""
But i DID that
Kat
3. RE: booleans
I think there must be an error in your code..
I tested what you explained, and it works for me..
Though "if (result="") then".. doesn't work on sequences
Here's my test code..
< CODE >
object Result Result=""
-- if ( Result="" ) then
if ( equal(Result,"") ) then
printf(1,"%s",{"Worked"})
end if
-- end if
< END OF CODE >
Perhaps the assignment isn't read by the interpretter until after the if
structures? Or is your code inline?
Chris
Kat wrote:
> Here is an example of the trouble i have with Eu's comparisons:
>
> result = ""
> -- i had to give it "", or else "&=" gives an error 
> -- code doing things, but not changing result
>
> if ( result = "" ) then
> if equal(result,"") then
>
> both "if" statements give the same result:
>
> variable result has not been assigned a value
>
> So what i want to know is: how do i find out if result is still empty?
> length() is the only
> way? Ack!
>
> Kat
