RevMedia

Early specifications for the next release of Advanced Revelation suggest that users shouldn't depend too heavily on the functionality of the mouse as documented in Revmedia (see also the notes on Advanced Revelation 2.2 Paint in V3:10.)

It is not PDISK that was fixed in 2.11, rather $SETPTR which does in fact appear to be backward compatible to older versions. The legal niceties of and support for porting code to earlier versions remain unaddressed.

The QTip about pressing [F10] etc., to get system delimiters in the debugger doesn't appear to work, at least as of 2.10, where the debugger is using INPUT.KEY,- 1 rather than the older INPUT KEY. But we get [Esc] instead, plus some new things in 2.12.

Further comments to the note about testing for LEN(x). This technique is in the Revelation Technologies coding conventions (but not throughout the system for historical reasons), and thus explains, for example, why you cannot set @VIEW.MODE = 0 to disable the view window; you must set @VIEW.MODE = "". The moral is to favour null as a value for FALSE$ over the more common zero.

Finally, @REC.COUNT, documented everywhere (RM, too) as containing the count of select list keys, is also used for the entirely different function of maintaining a "records processed" counter in R/LIST. This makes the former information unavailable for use in symbolic fields in the latter process.

Post R/LIST Processing

A handy, if limited, post-R/LIST hook is provided by the item in the DICT of VOC called RLIST_TEXT_1. This field is used to find the soft text for the "xxx record Processed" message, which by definition follows last- record output. Because it is symbolic you can add any processing you like to it. Note that this doesn't work if you include a HEADING......

Bypassing DICT.MFS

If access to a file is being defeated by DICT.MFS (as can happen when unsuccessfully recompiling dict items after an upgrade. (The basic problem here is that a soon as the system sees the prefix 'DICT.' on a file, it slaps DICT.MFS on it, and DICT.MFS then goes through a normal check to see, for instance, if the control information has been matched to the current version etc.)), or (as Tony Preston of Preston Microsolutions points out) if you want to move or copy indexed fields without affecting the target, create a synonym for the dictionary in the volume directory. From SYSPROG (only) :

 ATTACH volume REVMEDIA
 COPY REVMEDIA DICT.file*
  account TO:XXX*account

Then attach as normal. The file 'XXX' will allow access to the dictionary without DICT.MFS. When finished with the synonym delete it from the volume directory. Do not use DELETEFILE for this or you will lose the file! Edit the REVMEDIA file directly, as above, and delete only the entry.

(A symptom of the above may be the error FS252, "Error compiling protection module" when upgrading to 2.12. In this case the dictionary item FMT needs to be removed!)