Re: Sometimes I just wonder, "WHY?!"

Alan Popiel (alan@po.den.mmc.com) wrote: : The report writing program ACE needs to know how many lines are in the : headers and trailers, so that it can properly format the pages. Since the : contents of a file could change between the time the report was compiled : and the time it was run, this could mess up the spacing, so files are : disallowed in headers and trailers. Right, same as 4GL. Conditionals like the following are also illegal: page header if foo = bar then skip 2 lines else skip 3 lines end if I once discovered that you can use a goto in a page header to jump out into a different report block. This fools 4GL completely--the line counter was thrown off and the printout was a mess. Nevertheless I used it to jump from a "first page header" block to a "page header" block when I wanted to do some initilization on the first call but print the same header. Then I decided that it was really awful code and rewrote it anyway. Hey, maybe you could use the same "trick" to dynamically alter the page length! That's an even worse idea. Never mind :-) Cheers, Jeff