jbrown@herron.uucp (Jordan Brown) (04/11/90)
In article <498@dbase.A-T.COM>, awd@dbase.A-T.COM (Alastair Dallas) writes some stuff in response to my article about record locking and... > ... but if it's a new design I would certainly hope Emerald Bay > would be considered. ... Why thank you very much for the kind words! > On the other hand, Ashton-Tate is working on making our file formats > available (over my objections, I might add) and in this era of glasnost > who knows what we'll decide to document? I'll consider this discussion > a request to be passed along to higher-ups. Given that one person I was chatting with didn't understand why you might object, I'll guess that you don't want to be restricted in what you can do in the future. I felt much the same way when I was at AT; I can certainly understand your point of view. Of course, if A-T decides to publish their file formats to encourage people to read and write them they should probably publish the locking protocols too as in a multiuser environment the one is pretty useless without the other. (Our approach to the problem is to supply routines that do "everything you might want", so that there's no *need* to know how we do things under the covers. (Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain :-) Of course there are still cases where one might for some perverse reason want to know how our files are laid out, how our low-level interface to our engine works, or how we talk on the network. Well, that's the tradeoff...) > I'm glad to see Jordan more active on the net; I'm sure he'd welcome > Emerald Bay questions, but he probably knows more about dBASE than I do. Yes, I welcome EB questions... whether I know more about dBASE than Alastair does, well, five years ago I certainly did, but as far as dBASE IV goes I rather doubt it. I still remember a lot about dBASE III, but that's not very interesting any more... > If he gets stuck, he can always ask Wayne Ratliff, the original author. True... -- Jordan Brown jbrown@jato.jpl.nasa.gov