On Tue, 27 May 1997 [log in to unmask] wrote:

> You can do this in Formspec now, too.  At least in MPE/iX 5.5; I'm not sure
> about 5.0.  You select what you want to copy, save it to a flat file, then
> go to where you want to copy it and copy the flat file.  It's not as
> complicated
> as it sounds, because it's all function keys.  Works well, very helpful.
>
>
Dear Cecile,

Imagine the following situation:

I have a form with 20 pair of similar fields F1, F2,...,F20; G1, G2, ...,
G20.  The field hadling of F1 refers to F1 five times, to G1 another five
times. If I correct the field handling in the outside flat file, I have to
make 20*(5+5)=200 corrections tbefore copying this flat file to the field
checks.

It would be nice if the FORMSPEC allowed a $THIS instead of the current
field , so I should not write
SET F1 TO F1 + 1,
...
SET F20 TO F20+ 1
but I could write
SET $THIS to $THIS + 1.
This would not solve the problem of statements like
SET F1 TO F1 + G1, ..., SET F20 TO F20 + G20.

What if I could use indexed field numbers like FIELD(1)
or
SET $THIS TO $THIS + $NEXT
or such staments like SET S TO SUM(1,40,2)
for summing every second field of the form?

Currently I handle this kind of complicated forms in Pascal
 where  can define arrays, and cycles.
                                     Regards
                                             Frank

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