Conference iosg::all-in-1_v30

    On a PFR, I consistently get 10069808 for all your examples.
    
    In fact, trying a few others (!SL, !ZL, etc.) none of them seem to
    work. Since all ALL-IN-1 symbols are strings, perhaps it makes sense
    that only !AS should work, although I suppose the others might work if
    you could work out how to pass the address of an integer to them!
    
    What I assume we are seeing is the result of decoding the address of
    the symbol's string descriptor - Perhaps I'll try it in a debug image
    and verify that!
    
    The APR is not very clear, since it says that all the normal FAO
    qualifiers can be used.
    
    Was this reported by a customer? I ask because we take customer
    discovered problems more seriously. If not, I'll submit it internally,
    since that's cheaper, and gets to us much quicker.
    
    Graham

    Graham my friend ;-),
    
    This is a customer discovery and he would like this to be solved
    because he is writing an application that requires the numbers to have
    leading zero's.
    
    Let me know if I have to SPR it and I will do so.
    
    Regards,
    
    Sunil

It is well known, although apparently not documented, that OA$FAO only works
for string data.  Graham's reasoning is correct: all ALL-IN-1 symbols are
stored as strings.  Trying to use an integer conversion (eg !XL) will pick
up the first longword of the string descriptor (that points to a string
containing the ASCII digits of the number) and display that.

As a workaround, the following script fragment will take a number in #num, add
leading zeroes to it to make its length #lz, and put it in #lznum:

get #lznum = ""
get #tnum = #num
get #tlz = #lz
.label loop
    compute #digit = #tnum mod 10
    compute #tnum = #tnum div 10
    get #lznum = #digit #lznum
    decrement #tlz
.if #tlz gt 0 then .goto loop

Or if you have V3.0, you can be even cleverer:

get #lznum = FN$FILL(#num, #lz, "0", 1)

Scott

PS - if I didn't make it clear in .3, this is a documentation bug - the APR
shouldn't say that you can use all the directives.  If you put in a code bug
asking for OA$FAO to support all directives, you'll be waiting a long time for
it to be implemented... :-)

Scott

    Hi,
    
    In the VMS documentation it states that !ZL converts a *longword* to
    decimal. Since the customer was not passing a longword but instead a
    string perhaps we can fault the customer's application! That the
    customer has no way of passing a longword parameter may not go down too
    well ;^)
    
    Cheers
    
    Stuart

    Am I being dense, or what?
    
    Doesn't this do it (to get #num padded with leading zeros to 6
    characters in this case)?
    
    get #a = '000000' #num
    get #lznum = #a::6
    
    (You can also do neat tricks to get stuff on the end, using :H to
    reverse the string).
    
    Of course, as Scott says, if you have v3.0 you can use the lexical
    function FN$FILL
    
    D.

    Hi All,
    
    The customer does not want me to submit an SPR because they are
    ditching ALL-IN-1 in favour of MS-mail .... (sorry for the pause just
    washing my mouth out ;-}).
    
    However I gave the customer another workaround and it is:
    
    get oa$dcl="write oamailbox ""OA get #num = ''f$fao("""!8ZL""" , 1)'"""
    get oa$dcl="@DCLMAILBOX"
    
    I would be grateful if someone in IOGland can record this problem in
    the database of known problems and something in Stars.
    
    Regards,
    
    Sunil

    OK, I'll submit the bug internally, and I'll note that a customer
    discovered it, to help its classification.
    
    I don't know whether that means it gets to STARs automatically.
    
    Graham
    
    PS I'm jealous of your workround, I only wish I'd thought of using DCL!

   G'dye Sunil,

   Sorry sport, but yer needed yer crystal ball here.  

   We have an undocumented function in V3.0 (which we plan to document for a
   PFR) which I initially wrote to test the Centalized Parser keyword
   functions, and because I thought it _couldn't_ do a worse job than OA$FAO,
   which effectively only supports formatting input FAO parameters which are
   ASCII only.
   (Also there's the nonsense of having to put the output symbol name as a
   quoted string!).
   Try this in A1 command mode {KEY 7}:

   GET #temp = 0
   INCREMENT(#temp)
   FAO(FORMAT="!8ZL",OUT=OA$DISPLAY,P1=#temp)

   On IOSG (admittedly running a PFR) I get the result:

   00000001

   Cheers,

   Ian

re .6

>> Doesn't this do it
>>    get #a = '000000' #num
>>    get #lznum = #a::6

Not when I tried it.  It just gives the end of the string, starting at the
seventh character.  But
      get #a = '000000' #num
      get #a = #a:H
      get #a = #a:6
      get #lznum = #a:H

does seem to work.

Scott

    Sorry - I forgot to put the :H's in.
    
    D.