At 01:24 PM 07/17/00, Wirt Atmar disagrees:
>Tom writes:
>
> > >You're probably right, but I still don't like relying on a negative, I'd
> >  >rather rely on a positive.
> >
> >  I agree!
>
>As long as I'm in a "disagreeable" mode of late, let me disagree with Tom too.
>
>When it gets down to the nitty-gritty, the code that you would have to write
>to engage the "positive" test is bound to be exactly identical to the
>"negative" code that exists now: a test would have to be made to see if the
>chain length of the particular datavalue in the manual master is zero or not.
>If it is, then the entry can be safely deleted. If it isn't, then it can't.
>
>It's only the wording of the test that would be differently phrased, not the
>code, and that's more a matter of psychology than physics (but that's to say
>that I don't think that user psychology and understanding is not very
>important).

Well, heck.  In this particular case, I would write DBDELETES rather
DBGETS/DBFINDS.  Certainly, if one had more than one detail linked to the
master, the number of DBFINDS quickly would become unwieldy.

However, in general, I would rather see if I can do something first, rather
than just do something and expect it to fail if I can't.



Tom Brandt
Northtech Systems, Inc.
http://www.northtech.com