Re: read on a do loop

Rich,

Many functions I've worked with (like some of the C routines) return
non-zero values if an error occurs and zero if no error occurred.  I follow
that same practice with my procedures that return error indicators - *Off is
ok, *On was an error.

Using a SUCCESS constant is just another level of obfuscation which, IMHO,
doesn't improve the code.  I have to go track down where and how SUCCESS is
defined to see how the DoW loop ends.

I might be more inclined to reword the read_example() routine to something
more like MoreRecords() which describes the returned indicator better.  But
MoreRecords() doesn't make it obvious that this routine is actually reading
a record.  ReadExample() describes what's going on in the routine but
doesn't describe very well the indicator being returned.  I'd rather split
the function up into two parts for these two behaviours.  One function does
the read with no returned indicator.  One function just tests for more
records:

ReadExample();
DoW MoreRecords();
   // ...
   ReadExample();
EndDo;

But this gets away from your coding of the one function to control the DoW
loop.

Paul