50 replies to this topic

[Shaun Rudland]

If I were involved in the development of an Environment that automatically maintained the contents of Logic 000, the the last thing I would want is Developers 'tooling' around with the contents of the said logic. They are bound to mess it up, and then guess who gets the blame; I'm sure PRO-IV's helpdesk would love logging endless Logic 000 problems.
Regardless of the pros and cons of automatically controlling Logic 000, one thing is certain, in order to maintain integrity, manual and automatic maintenance are mutually exclusive; for everyone's sake.

[Mike Nicholson]

I don't really see how anybody could mess up a define statement, and as that's all you can put in logic 0 what's the problem??

Besides, the issue here is not really that everybody would want to use log 000 100% of the time. It would be nice to have it to start with as it is what people are used to can develop faster with. Having to reach for the mouse to find the menu option to maintain varibles might be considered a bit restrictive by experienced programmers.

I think the real complaint here is that several people have expressed a desire for a feature and have been told point blank that they don't want it!

Just a thought but perhaps ProIV should consider the old adage of 'the customer is always right'.

This is not to say that we don't appreciate Neils participation in this forum because I'm pretty sure we all do but it would be nice to know that when we're asked for suggestions there is actually somebody who listens to us.

Cheers

Mike

[Rob Atherton]

Sorry Neil,

I think you are getting the wrong end of the stick. I was trying to make the point that as developers using various development tools, we know what we want to be able to do. My post wasn't meant to be exclusively about Logic 000, it was an example of the fact that ProIV seem to impose on us what you think we want.

Personnally, I think the scratch variable thing is a good idea. However, logic 000 will only allow DEFINE statements to be entered and formatted correctly or you get a gen error. In this case, I thought it would nice to have the option to use either as you can't really get it wrong using @MODX. I assume you testing of Developer Studio covered the possibilty of Logic 000 being formatted with more than one space between the 'DEFINE' and the variable name as that is about the only thing can be varied and allow the function to gen.

I'd like to think that I understand what Developer Studio offers as you were kind enough to give a number of us a demonstration of Developer Studio when I was working on a project at St Ives for an un-named Motor company. We had to use Studio for 9 months I was there.

I can't comment for my peers as to whether or not they'd be impressed by me entering 'DEFINE' statements in logic 000. Maybe I should write a utility to format Logic 000 in the way studio does which we can use here until VIP is upon us to save the day.

[Glenn Meyers]

We have, I think reached the crux of the problem. PROIV staffers like Neil all really do try to do what is right for the customer base. It is, in fact, the upper and top levels of management at PROIV that think we are all sheep and MUST be led (and shorn). Until the blinkered philistine pig ignorance that come from that non-creative..... well, you know the bit.... Until that thinking ends, this kind of issue will remain, not becuase of the people doing the work at PROIV, but because of their purposeful and enforced isolation from the PROIV user community. My guess, from first hand experience, is that they (PROIV management) will come down like a ton of bricks on Neil and any other staffer who dares communicate with us and really tries to examine the issues we the user base want and need. It is an issue of control, and us wee poor children cannot possibly understand what is in our own best interests.

Bag-o-wind mode cancelled.

[Shaun Rudland]

Reading through the rest of the threads, I think PRO-IV's plan would be to combine the definitions in Logic 000 with a Local Variable checker, whereby all Local Variables that are utilised within the function will require a definition in Logic 000. I have worked at many sites where this kind of correlation has been performed manually. Even if the developers are diligent about definitions, or an automatic definition tool is used, it is still possible to use Local Variables within the function that have not been previously defined. Having used such development environments as Oracle PL/SQL, I find this 'loophole' can sometimes be an extreme annoyance when attempting to locate runtime errors. The mere fact that a significant number of sites have developed their own method of populating Logic 000, would lead PRO-IV to believe that the automation of this process would be a step in the right direction.

[tclulow]

[quote name='Ralph Gadsby' date='22 Feb 2001, 04:36']It was a tool supplied by Noha for editing functions. Fairly similar to Pro-Aide in concept. There was also a debugger called PDB, this worked by inserting UMSGs after every line of logic!

Ralph[/quote]
[QUOTE]

Actually, it works like this:
GEN the function (to make sure it does)
Butcher the function inserting a few extra LSes and LSCALLS to these LSes in the logic.
GEN again
Put the function back how it was.

When the function runs, the extra LSes pop up as required (breakpoints, single-step logic, changes to watched data etc) to show where the processing is, the values of the variables (which can be changed) and manipulation of the debugging (eg new breakpoints set).

Tony