On 4 Oct 2001, at 11:44, Helen Borrie wrote:

> At 09:03 PM 03-10-01 -0400, you wrote:
> >Hi:
> >
> > Same old crap I keep forgetting about the : at *** below caused
> >Invalid Command error
> >on prepare. I will never understand this as examples show things like
> >
>
> When the variable on the left side of an assignment or comparison
> operation, omit the colon; otherwise include it.
>
> I don't know whether this less-than-helpful piece of documentation
> resulted from a failed attempt by the programmers to make things work
> in a more obvious way, or what, but if you follow what the current
> documentation says, you are going to get errors. The usual one from
> omitting the colon is "Column VRATE not found" (or something of that
> ilk).
>
> The question is, should it be treated as a code bug or a documentation
> bug?
>
Both. Really it should require that variable names and column names
be unique, the declaration of the variable should be enough to heads-
up the parser to it's existance. Where you can't guarantee
uniqueness, then the colon could be used to denote the variable just
as a tablename. denotes the column. This would make life easier all
around.

Paul


Paul Schmidt,
Tricat Technologies
Email: paul@...
Website: www.tricattechnologies.com