Those of you who remember high school physics know that the theories
     of quantum physics refer to activities of sub-atomic particles.  One
     theory states that the act of observation at the quantum level will
     impact the actual event.
 
     Well it seems a new 'feature' of MPE/iX 5.0 appears to bring the
     properties of quantum physics up to a much higher level.  I found this
     humorous and thought I would share this 'discovery'.
 
     When a file is opened for write access, the EOF is normally not
     updated until the file is closed, or until a specific FCONTROL is
     issued to post the updated EOF to the file label.  Well no more!  The
     act of observing the file label (reading the file label by LISTF or by
     an MPEX file search) will now cause the current EOF of the opened file
     to be posted to the file label. But the display from the LISTF will
     show the original EOF, not the revised one!  The revised EOF will only
     appear on subsequent LISTF displays.  This 'quantum observation'
     effect also occurs when doing a MPEX file search, even though the
     opened file is not selected for display.
 
     On the practical side, I have used this to our advantage to workaround
     a problem with 3rd party software that has a file open all day,
     writing logged events. If the system should halt, all the data in this
     file is normally lost since the EOF is not updated.  But now, I can
     have a LISTF command execute every hour to have the EOF updated.  This
     reduces the potential data loss to at most one hour.