Hi everyone,

today I was really suprised when I saw the following line of WF code from a collegue (WF 7.7.03 - still works in 7.7.05)

 WHERE FIELD1 = &FILTER.QUOTEDSTRING; 

I though, well this will never work. But actually - yes - it does work.
While I could not find it anywhere in any document or this forum:

The assignment operator "=" can be used as a synonym for the relational op: "EQ".
I knew about "IS" - but "=" - well it known e.g. as the relational comparison op in SQL, Pascal ... but in WebFOCUS?

I also tried it in DM - and well, it works, too.

 
-SET &TEST = IF 0 = 1 THEN 'YES' ELSE 'NO';
-TYPE &TEST
-* a.m. &TEST matches
-SET &TEST = IF 0 EQ 1 THEN 'YES' ELSE 'NO';
-TYPE &TEST

But, as you might guess, and we are working in WebFOCUS: all the other known ops like "<", ">", "<>", "<=", ">=" -> they do not work / are not symbolic for "LT" etc.

I do not say, that I prefer "EQ" to "=", but hey - if we are ongoingly talking about WebFOCUS and code-tightening - why introduce 2 symbols for the equality operator (and not for the other relational operators).

IMHO this is the complete opposite of a tightend reporting language.

Cheers Linne

This message has been edited. Last edited by: <Kathryn Henning>,

They never introduced the = to be equivalent to EQ, the code tightening hasn't caught up to this coding mistake yet.

Yes, its been there for a very long time.

It may stop working in WF 8.0.25 or WF 8.3.01 HotFix 7 or any other interesting release in the future. Better to get rid of it now and stick to the standard and documented operators