Suggested Changes to 4GL

My Christmas list: -All fields/literals on forms should have attribute bytes associated with them which you can control from a 4GL program. So for example, if you want to hide a field for some users and not others you could use the same form and set an attribute byte to display/not display the field. -Consistency between the code which RDS executes and the binary code. -Better documentation with better examples. The examples always explain the obvious. -Improved documentation on datetime/intervals -- the provided documentation is almost useless. Whenever I try to do anything new with them it takes a call to support and the faxing of some tech note. -Some sort of statements similar to #define in C. -Blob manipulation functions (compare, copy, append, etc) I had to write my own. -let reca.* = recb.* work for records containing a blob -Allow the NEXT FIELD function outside of the input/input array funtion. If you had fields that were similar on varied forms, you could create a one function to complete the edits rather than duplicating that same code all over the place. -Build in mechanism for error handling that stores data in tables and not in UNIX flat files. -Don't file the last page of a report with blank lines -- my users HATE this! -Get rid of termcaps, have some other more user friendly mechanism for communicating the key mappings. -A GUI -Debugger: Have a goto or re-execute function type of command Debbie Johnson Phone: 503-578-3767 503-578-9890 (FAX) U.S. Mail: E-Mail: Mail Stop: RHE1-877 SEQUENT: debbj@sequent.com Sequent Computer Systems UUCP: sequent!debbj 15450 SW Koll Parkway Beaverton, Or 97006-6063