Line limit ?

[Kimed]

Hi,

The online help on "Command Continuation" states that "The maximum number of characters per command line is 2,048". I used to believe that and write long operators whenever necessary (split by ';', that is). But at some point I was rather harshly rebuked by some programmer whose app I had to modify (the job was urgent, and the author was unavailable at the time) to make no operators longer than 256 symbols. The program itself looked to work alright, as far as I could see, so is there a possible point to such a limitation?

 

[alvechurchdata]

I dislike very long lines but that's only because I find them very difficult to read and debug.

A line of 2048 characters is equivalent to 40 lines of 50 characters each and that's a long way to go without comments and without any chance of using the debugger to break into the chunk of code.

Geoff Franklin

http://www.alvechurchdata.co.uk

 

[Kimed]

That I understand. I was talking about multi-line operators with *summary* length above 256.

 

[Stella740pl]

Kimed, that's right, in a multi-line operator with summary length above 256, broken by semicolons,
you can not insert any comment at the end of the line after the semicolon, only at the end of the whole statement. And it is hard to break into it using debugger to say which part of that block of code has an error in it.

But they do work. I don't remeber, though, if it always been 2048, or it used to be 256 at some point in some version.
If it was 256 in some older days, maybe that programmer either has to make that backward compatible, or just readable, or just doesn't know about the new 2048 limitation.