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COMLIB Cleanup

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Edja
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COMLIB Cleanup
« Thread started on: Jan 19^th, 2017, 09:54am »

I've written a program making use of COMLIB to manipulate Excel sheets. I use PROCcleanup as documented on the WIKI.
Code:

DEF PROCcleanupXlapp%  += 0 : IF Xlapp%  PROC_releaseobject(Xlapp%)  : Xlapp% = 0Xlbook% += 0 : IF Xlbook% PROC_releaseobject(Xlbook%) : Xlbook% = 0ENDPROC

All works fine !
But I fail to understand the purpose of the statements Xlapp% +=0 and Xlbook% += 0
Are Xlapp% and Xlbook% changed after execution of those statements ?

Edja

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Richard Russell
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Re: COMLIB Cleanup
« Reply #1 on: Jan 19^th, 2017, 2:13pm »

on Jan 19^th, 2017, 09:54am, Edja wrote:

But I fail to understand the purpose of the statements Xlapp% +=0 and Xlbook% += 0

It's a standard technique to avoid the reporting of 'No such variable' errors. Commonly, a cleanup routine will be called from an ON ERROR handler, and in that case you may not easily be able to guarantee that variables used in the cleanup process have ever been created. In your specific example, what would happen if the error occurred before the code which assigns a value to Xlapp% or Xlbook% had been executed?

What is needed is some code that will create a variable if it does not already exist, but leave its value unchanged if it does. There are three pretty-much equivalent methods to achieve this:

Code:

      variable += 0      variable *= 1      variable = variable

My habit is to use the first, but apart from possibly being slightly faster there's not a lot to choose between them.

Richard.

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