Ted writes:
> Things were going smoothly.  I HPFOpened the file, did the FFILEINFO call and
> got the name into a character array.  The rename worked beautifully.  I
> appended a semi-colon to the POSIX name in the character array (as a
> terminating character--see HPFOPEN documentation) and called HPFOPEN.  A bunch
> of debugging down the road, I discover that

For item#2 (file name), you need a special character at the START and at
the END ... not just at the end (and, btw, a semicolon isn't a good choice even
for FOPEN...I recommend blank or null ... you're probably too young :) to
remember the chaos caused by some HP programmer saying to himself/herself
"I'll use a colon").

I.e, to open /foo/fum/fie  specify something like  -/foo/fum/fie-

Yes, it's dumb...really dumb...whoever designed that aspect of HPFOPEN
should have simply said "terminate with a null" or something equally simple.
And, no, I don't think filenames should be allowed to have embedded blanks :)


> The PASCAL XL STRING OPTION (item# 51) is not valid, or a bounds violation
> occurred on this option.  (FILE OPEN ERROR -455)

A common problem...using item 51 is harder than you think because of
a poor choice in the implementation of item 51.  (I.e., the designer
compensated for a quirk of Pascal's procedure calling convention, rather than
documenting how to defeat Pascal ... but with the result that it's hard
to use by all non-Pascal callers, and some Pascal callers.)

<plug>
The answer to *that* problem is in the CSEQ output ... and I'm not
posting it this time :)     Hint:   cseq +hpfopen   look at item 51
</plug>

--
Stan Sieler                                          [log in to unmask]
                                     http://www.allegro.com/sieler.html