Stan writes :-
>That sparks my 10-year+ long complaint about the CI "programming"
>facility.  It's flawed, and prevents writing bulletproof readable
>programs.    (I'm impressed when people write complex scripts ...
>but I long for "real" variables, parameters, local variables, functions,
>and more)
>echo !stf_final   won't show you the contents of the variable "stf_final"
>in all cases.
>BTW, echo can be used:
>   echo ![stf_final]
>      you'll see "!foo"
>Note: all of the "you'll see" output actually appears without the
>quotes.

I agree 100% with all that, and look forward to some of these features
(esp local vars & functions) appearing in the CI soon. And also perhaps
some direct file-handling (eg., vefopen,vefread etc...).

One of my disappointments in the current CI is that the echo statement
you give above fails when stf_final contains a valid piping construct
(eg., < x or > x), the sort of thing you might encounter when trying
to preprocess job streams etc.
Perhaps someone may be able to suggest a clean way around it ?.
The best I have at the moment is ( thanks to the new repl function)
  ECHO ![repl(repl(stf_final,"<","!<"),">","!>")]
Pretty ugly, eh !

While I am at it, another pet peeve ( or minor disappointment) but not
related to the CI, is using the intrinsic FREAD in a program to read file
number 0, or $stdin, when $stdin is a message file.
Everything works great until you come to error handling. For example,
if you set a timeout using FCONTROL{4}, the timeout works fine, but you
have no way of knowing that it was a timeout. Ie., FCHECK returns 0
rather than 22.
Has anybody else noticed this , or is aware of an outstanding SR on
something like this ?

Regards,
Tad.






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