Conference hydra::amiga_v1

3239.0. "Professional Dataretrieve woes " by CANAM::SULLIVAN (Steven E. Sullivan) Tue Dec 19 1989 14:36

I have been trying to use PDR for several days now to build a "simple"
index/directory of the amiga files on BIX. The envisioned proceedure is
to download the weekly directory and have a PROFIL (the PDR programming
language) program parse the entries and build a database record for each
file. 

The problem I have run into is the input command (for reading ascii input)
does not work for file based input. The program below will cause the problem:

def [rec]=string		:REM Declare string for input
fcloseall 	 		:REM Close all open files
fopen 1,"di4:amiga.test"	:REM Open target file
input 1,[rec]			:REM Input a line of text

The error I get is illegal channel number. The manual says it means I have
not opened the file. Funny, I can write to it just fine. The "isfopen"
command tells me that channel 1 is open. It would appear that this is a
bug in PDR, and in a very very basic function too! I called Abacus and 
the very polite person suggested removing the space between "input" and 
"1". I did this and there was no change. 

Have other folks used PDR successfully? How about profil? I have version
1.03 of PDR and abacus tell me this is the latest version - vintage early 
1988.

The second thing I tried was reading the file into a PDR file with one line to
a record. This was not hard to set up, but there are clearly some bugs in how
things work. I consistently met the guru before the transfer was finished.
It was clearly affecting other tasks and was affected by other tasks running.
Multitasking ment a guru much much sooner than if I left it alone. Still,
always a guru.

Abacus' reply to this was to suggest I had a corrupt disk. They are sending a
new one, but I am suspicious of "swapping" the software. I think it is not 
likely to help.

Have other folks had problems like this with PDR?? In other folks experiences,
is it *REALLY*  this buggy???

I am a very frustrated camper. It is a pain to have to debug your tools.

	Thanks,
		-SES

    I know absolutely nothing about PDR, but generally open commands allow
    you to request a particular access mode.  Maybe fopen defaults to
    opening for write mode?  You might want to check your manual to see if
    there is another parameter you can specify.
    
    - steve

RE: .1

Steve,

I thought of that one... nothing in the manual so I gave it a test.
I "fopen"ed a "con:0/10/100/100/test" window and input worked there
just fine with no other changes. It seems to be something specific 
with files.

I am most interested in finding someone that has PDR that can try it
on their machine. Sometimes SW companies change a program without
bothering to change the version number. Sort of like commodore's constant
upgrading of the Amiga motherboards... there is nothing on the outside of
the machine to indicate that it was changed... This is what I am hoping 
to find out with the PDR disk Abacus is sending me; still version 1.03,
but *is* it really?

	Thanks,
		-SES