[Gambas-user] Some new features in Gambas 3

[Kevin Fishburne]

On 01/01/2011 11:34 AM, Benoît Minisini wrote:
>>> 2) A new set of native functions named Mk<XXX>$() to create a string from
>>> the
>>> memory representation of a value. For example, MkShort$(1234) returns
>>> Chr$(210)&  Chr$(4) (on a little endian machine).
>> I'm updating GambasTester to handle new commands and features.
>>
>> And I don't quite understand these new functions...
>> MkByte$(65) returns "A" which is expected if string is created with ascii
>> encoding.
>> But MkBoolean(True) returns "^A", and according to documentation boolean
>> value size is one byte
>> in memory. This string occupies two bytes?
> "^A" is the way the IDE console displays Chr$(1).
>
>> But moreover, what is intended use of these functions?
> One ask them to forge a string of binary data to be sent on an UDP socket. But
> this is not necessarily the right way to do that, as data on the network must
> be endianness-agnostic. So maybe these functions are not really useful indeed.
It's hard to know what uses people will put functions to once they're in 
the wild. The original use was what Benoît described. Whether endianness 
is an issue depends on what the UDP data is being sent to or received 
from. In my case it's the same program on the same architecture, so it 
works fine. I think a note in the documentation about endianness would 
help should someone want to use the functions.

It seems to me a little strange to have ASC and STR$ but not equivalents 
for other datatypes. Some day some other programmer will see these 
functions and be extremely happy, probably for some purpose we haven't 
yet imagined.

-- 
Kevin Fishburne
Eight Virtues
www: http://sales.eightvirtues.com
e-mail: sales at ...1887...
phone: (770) 853-6271