Why VdB 5.7 ignores ampersand?

[IlyaRabyy]

Colleagues,

AFAIR, the xBase family accepted the & (ampersand) operator and treated it as a sign of a macro substitution, i.e.

cFile2Open = cPath + "MyTable.DBF"
USE &cFile2Open

worked just fine. It still does in Visual FoxPro, but I'm having trouble with it in Visual dBase 5.7: whatever I have the memvar for the full path to a DBF named, it ignores that & and treats the memvar as a file name, i.e.

&cFile2Open

becomes

cFile2Op.DBF

that is ignoring & operator and truncating it down to 8 chars (if it's more than 8), and then dBase errs saying
"cFile2Op.DBF not found".

What and/or where I have to look to find the cause of such behavior?


Regards,

Ilya

 

[IlyaRabyy]

Awww, b-bllllloody hell!
dBase ignores ampersand in front of the memvars declared as LOCAL! And I declared my memvar as LOCAL...
The issue's resolved, the case is being closed.
My apologies for the "disturbance in the Force". [ :~/]

Regards,

Ilya

 

[dbMark]

Could you use "name expressions"? From what I remember, it has the advantage of being a few microseconds faster than macrosubstitution too.

cFile2Open = cPath + "MyTable.DBF"
USE (cFile2Open)

Or this simpler usage:

USE (cPath + "MyTable.DBF")