Re: read on a do loop

On Mon, 2005-08-22 at 14:23 -0400, Paul Morgan wrote:
> Rich,
> 

> ReadExample();
> DoW MoreRecords();
>    // ...
>    ReadExample();
> EndDo;
> 
> But this gets away from your coding of the one function to control the DoW
> loop.
> 
> Paul

Right.  I'm a DOW-er, and this is the principal construct I use to read
records.  Been doing it that way since 1985.  It's simple, it works, it
doesn't have extra logic or comparisons.  

read example;
dow not %eof example;
    // process
    read example;
enddo;

The downside is that you have to duplicate the 'read' in two places and
I think this chafes on some folks, and is probably why some prefer the
DOU construct.

It seems that many of the other languages I have used use the 'read
return success' method I have proposed.

In perl, as an alternative language example, the DBI construct is:
while ($row_ref = $sth->fetchrow_hashref) {
    // process record
}

In C, the 'fread' function returns the number of items it successfully
read.

>From a big picture perspective, it seems that returning a positive
result for success is quite logical.

I hope that if we ever get a %read bif, it will return true if a record
was successfully read.

   
Regards,
Rich