Re: %EOF, %FOUND and the infamous Dow loop

[Scott Klement <klemscot@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 1 Jan 2002, Douglas Handy wrote:
>
> It would be great to be able to give it any function or procedure name and 
>have
> it display the return value, not just certain BIFs...
>

If you did the return value for a user-written function/procedure wouldn't
it then have to re-run the function?   If that function updates something,
or prints something, or does communication (etc) that might not be a good
idea.

Plus, it could potentially return a different result than it did before
you typed "eval" in the debug window.

So how would you design this?  Save the return value of the function
somewhere, and display THAT?  Where would you save it?  How long would you
save it?  Until the function has been run again?  Or would each new
call to the function create a separate space in memory?

I agree that this would be handy, but it seems complicated :)  for BIF's
that return a simple indicator value, it wouldnt be so hard -- but
user-defined functions?  That seems like a whole different thing...