Naming Variables
OK, tell me again why you are restricting variable names to eight characters. You've always done it that way. #FILES limits you to eight bytes. Long names are too hard to type correctly.
#CFILES, which is where you should be now, does not limit the IB name to eight bytes. You may wonder what the limit is. I know I did so I checked the documentation: http://www.signature.net/dbmanager.html. Of course I did not find out because there is no reference to the maximum length of the IB name, but it is surely longer than eight bytes.
And UltraEdit will help with entering those long variable names. The magic is the less than well documented AutoComplete feature in UE. You invoke it with Ctrl+Space. The full explanation can be found in the UE help by searching for Auto Completion. I found it by searching for Ctrl+Space. It's great but it's not perfect. Of course, UE does not look in USEFILEs or INCLUDE files. That's a bummer. And UE only looks back. In other words, if the first reference to a variable is below your current location in the file, the Auto Completion feature does not work. Now I'm still on version 10 but the promotional material on the UltraEdit site reads just like the current HELP text - UE looks backward through 50K for auto completion help.
UltraEdit has another quirk that you need to know. The program sees periods as an end-of-word marker. So, if you have a long variable name like MAX.STRING.LEN UltraEdit will not help you. Try it yourself. Start UE. Load up FILEFIND.INC from WDL. Type MAX and press CTRL+SPACE. Bummer.
So here's my rant. Use longer and more descriptive variable names. Don't punctuate the names with periods. Learn to use UltraEdit's not-so-fabulous Auto Completion. You'll be glad you did.
#CFILES, which is where you should be now, does not limit the IB name to eight bytes. You may wonder what the limit is. I know I did so I checked the documentation: http://www.signature.net/dbmanager.html. Of course I did not find out because there is no reference to the maximum length of the IB name, but it is surely longer than eight bytes.
And UltraEdit will help with entering those long variable names. The magic is the less than well documented AutoComplete feature in UE. You invoke it with Ctrl+Space. The full explanation can be found in the UE help by searching for Auto Completion. I found it by searching for Ctrl+Space. It's great but it's not perfect. Of course, UE does not look in USEFILEs or INCLUDE files. That's a bummer. And UE only looks back. In other words, if the first reference to a variable is below your current location in the file, the Auto Completion feature does not work. Now I'm still on version 10 but the promotional material on the UltraEdit site reads just like the current HELP text - UE looks backward through 50K for auto completion help.
UltraEdit has another quirk that you need to know. The program sees periods as an end-of-word marker. So, if you have a long variable name like MAX.STRING.LEN UltraEdit will not help you. Try it yourself. Start UE. Load up FILEFIND.INC from WDL. Type MAX and press CTRL+SPACE. Bummer.
So here's my rant. Use longer and more descriptive variable names. Don't punctuate the names with periods. Learn to use UltraEdit's not-so-fabulous Auto Completion. You'll be glad you did.
posted by Steve Auerbach at
7:23 AM
1 Comments:
Barbara reminds me that the maximum length of a IB variable is on the web site at: http://signature.net/ib/varnames.htm
She does not explicitly say that the the DB Manager will accept variables this long, but we know Barbara and she is usually straight.
Post a Comment
<< Home