[Coco] Digging deeper into DCom

[Wayne Campbell]

I realized that I needed to look at the problem with DCom from a different angle. The way I remember it, DCom 3.5 was the version that did everything correctly, with the exception of the TYPE statement problems documented in the manual.

Based on this, I had reason to doubt that my code, as it was printed out, was the problem. I probably misnamed some variables somewhere, and may be passing bad variables to the procedures. To find out, I had to recreate the procedures I wrote to read the contents of the data files. I never printed those out, but I knew recreating them would be easier since the code already exists in DCom to recreate them with.

I wrote it today. I have not test-run it yet. I opted to write a single procedure that deals with all of the files, as opposed to separate procedures for each file (which is the way I wrote them originally). Once I can see where the data is becoming corrupted, I can determine where in the code to look for the problem.

I have chosen to call it DCRead, to show its connection to DCom. Once I have it in final form, I will upload the source and binaries to sourceforge. I do have one question, for those who understand programming and Basic09 syntax. When I get the code to DCRead uploaded to sourceforge, I would like to know if there's a better way to write it. I know my code works, but there are times when I think I may be missing something, and there should be an easier way to write the code.

Studying ZAP has shown me that it may be possible to write faster code than I am aware of. I just need an example in terms of something familiar to help me see how to do it. I appreciate any help I can get in this regard.

Wayne