RE: Benefits of Sub-procedures

["Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Hans Boldt
> 
> Then again, you assume wrong. Sure, I'll be quite happy to admit
> that sometimes you need some complex coding to replace in /FREE what
> you could do simply in fixed calcs. But I would argue that if you're
> mixing data types (which is I think the biggest source of code
> expansion), you're probably coding your app the wrong way to begin
> with.

That's just not true.  In the real world, we mix data types all the
time.  Dates go into lot numbers, sequence numbers go into order
numbers, part numbers contain subcodes, all kinds of things like that.

Admittedly it's not a huge part of our day, but it's crucial to be able
to do it easily.  Data structures are a reasonable workaround, though,
so I don't think you can say anything bad about BIFs; it's just that
there's a lot of older code that used MOVEs, and that's where we run
into compatibility issues.

Joe