Saturday 16 June 2012

Undocumented feature - interrupt - part seven


Continuing from part six where we looked at "10", "11" and "12" onwards, we're now going to look at "989".  This has a number of different uses, which are used by the debugger, so should be relatively safe to use moving forwards.


989 - Application focus


When the debugger kicks in, maybe caused by a debug statement in your code, the focus is immediately set to the debugger.  Apparently this is done using the interrupt command...


interrupt(989,"APPLFOCUS")


As far as I can tell this doesn't work, maybe because I'm using Windows 7 for my testing.  When you hit a debug statement it does bring the debugger into focus, but if my Uniface application calls the interrupt command above whilst another application has focus, it does not come into focus as I would expect.





989 - Format string


According to PUUU, this is supposed to format a string by adding carriage returns in.  It's not clear on the details, but something like this...


$result "RPL"
interrupt(989,"FORMAT")
string = $result


However, I couldn't get this to work for me, $result remained unaffected.  If you wanted to do something like this then you could use string manipulation, but I'm not sure why you'd want to.  Again, this is supposed to be used by the debugger, but I can't recall seeing an behaviour like this myself.





989 - Undo gold


When the debugger displays lists, it always uses semi-colon (;) and exclamation mark (!) as the delimiter, instead of their gold equivalents.  Apparently it uses the following command to do it...



$result "R·;P·!L"
interrupt(989,"UNDOGOLD")
string = $result

This replaces the gold delimiters with their normal equivalents.  It does not replace the wildcard characters, only the delimiters.  This one does actually work!  It's easy to find an alternative using $replace however...

string = $replace($replace("R·;P·!L",1,"·;",";",-1),1,"·!","!",-1)

This code is probably slightly easier to read, as you can easily see which characters are included in the "undo".  How about the performance though, over 2,000,000 iterations...

  • interrupt = 00:07.89, 00:07.64, 00:07.73 (almost 8 seconds)
  • $replace = 00:07.95, 00:07.83, 00:07.88 (almost 8 seconds)
So as you can see, it takes pretty much exactly the same amount of time either way, so I'll definitely be sticking with the alternative, instead of using interrupt.

Summary: Numeric code "989" has multiple uses, but it seems that they either don't work any more, or are easily replaced with alternatives.  I'll do a full summary of the interrupt command in the next post.




No comments:

Post a Comment