EDITING WITH DBASE
by Jim Hicks, SNUG, October 1987

(A tip on one limitation of the dBase II command editor)

I ran into something while writing a program that I hadn't
encountered before.  As usual, I was using Wordstar to write the
dBase program (using non-document mode, of course).  While
running the program, I needed to make a small change and used the
dBase editor to make it instead of exiting dBase and returning to
Wordstar.  When I reran the program, it bombed out!

The problem was because the dBase editor only uses an 80
character wide line.  I had written one of the program lines in
Wordstar that was some 90 characters long.  When I used the dBase
editor, it chopped off the 10 extra characters which caused the
program to crash.

Lesson learned - either make sure your dBase program lines don't
exceed 80 characters or else make any changes using the text
editor you originally used to write the program.  Ah, the hazards
of trying to program these beasts.
