HP Eloquence A.06.31 Release Notes

A.06.31 Release Notes

HP Eloquence Language

This document covers fixes and enhancements which have been integrated into the HP Eloquence A.06.31 eloq and eloqcore programs.

Contents of this document:

Enhancements
Fixed problems
The PRINTER IS statement (documentation update)

Enhancements

Please refer to the DLG Enhancement document for more information in dialog releated changes.

A new -dlg command line option is supported by eloq and eloqcore (#505/#507).
Status codes when the ASYNC protocol mode is used are no longer returned to the application but the first status code one is saved.
The saved ASYNC status code error can be retrieved with the DLG GET ".async_status",R statement.
The DLG GET ".driver_type",Result$ returns the driver type or an empty string.
A DLG SET ".debug",1 can be used to output ASYNC status codes to stderr.
The new Log identifier 'G' can be used to request GUI related debug information.
The interpretation of dialog resource files has been enhanced to support setting attributes of child objects. Previous HP Eloquence versions returned an syntax error. (#503)
A DLG GET with a string result is always considered valid. Integer results are converted to a string. Previous versions returned an empty string if an integer result were to be assigned to a string variable. (#161)
The number of databases which can be opened simultaneously from HP Eloquence has been extended from 20 to 50 (#109).

Fixed problems

The LIST statement could return extra decimal digits for a program constant (#222).
For example:
```
  10 A=1936.27
```
The line above was output as
```
  10 A=1936.27000
```
The output format for program constants has been changed to be more consistent with previous HP Eloquence versions:
- A value with more than 5 trailing zeros is display in float format (1E6). Previously values with 4 trailing zeros were displayed in float format.
- A value with more than 4 leading zeros is displayed in float format (1E-6). Previously values with 3 leading zeros were displayed in float format.
The list command line utility and the HP Eloqence IDE have been changed accordingly.
The POPUP BOX statement could return wrong error numbers if a driver was set (#18).
A rounding problem has been fixed which could affect string conversion. For some values the result was truncated instead of rounded (#104).
```
  FIXED 0
  DISP VAL$(1234.568)
```
Printed in 1234 instead of 1235
Printing specific numeric values could cause a crash in eloqcore due to a buffer overflow.
Pressing the HALT function key (system functions) did not trigger ON HALT in a WAIT statement.
A failed DLG SET .driver could result in an unexpected termination of HP Eloquence.
Matrix operations could fail with an internal error if the destination matrix had more elements than the source matrix.

Linux Platform

Switching screen width (CRT COLS= statement) did not refresh the screen. (#221)
ON DELAY did not work correctly. Only the first timer interrupt was processed. After that any ON DELAY timer interrupt would be ignored and a timed WAIT would never expire.
An INPUT statement was not interrupted by serial data (TIO) as specified with an ON INPUT statement (#268).
eloqcore did not use primary TASKID values on the Linux platform (#358). eloqcore has been changed to make use of primary TASKID values when started in foreground.
The -log option did not work correctly on a glibc 2.1 (or newer) based system when using the libc6 build.
eloqcore did not correctly fallback to the default message catalog when the LANG environment variable was set to a value other than "C".

HP-UX Platform

A DBLOCK on a remote database running on an x86 platform (Linux, Windows) could crash eloqcore with a SIGBUS due to an alignment violation.

Windows Platform

The PAUSE key can now be used as a HALT key.
ON DELAY did not interrupt an INPUT statement.
Under certain circumstances eloqcore did not start-up in background mode. This especially happened if "Hide local EloqCORE console window" was checked in an HP Eloquence start file configuration. Error message: Failed to get screen buffer info
Given an unknown hostname or IP address in DLG SET ".driver" could cause eloqcore to hang infinitely.

The PRINTER IS statement (documentation update)

The PRINTER is statement has been modified in A.05.01 (and documented in the A.05.01 release notes) to support passing the output to operating system commands through a pipe. This was missing in the A.06.00 documentation (#496).

If the PRINTER IS statement is used with a string argument and the first character of the string is the '|' (pipe) character the remaining string is understood as an operating system command instead of a file name. All output is passed as stdin to the given commands. This makes it possible to dynamically use operating system capabilities.

The following example sends all output to lp program:

   PRINTER IS "|lp -dlj -o2"

Please note:

This does NOT affect printers assigned by eloq.config etc.