I wrote a procedure the other day in a rather hurried manner that was intended to round prices in a price list. The syntax checker crashed repeatedly, creating a dump file, when I checked this procedure, both in the Web interface and the Windows interface. I found what the offending statement was by the tedious process of removing as many lines as possible, then adding back individual parts until the program crashed again.
It was a 'simple' error - :QUANT = REALQUANT (1.0). The function REALQUANT expects to receive an integer for its input and outputs a real. In the above call, I am passing a real to the function that causes it to explode. Had I not been writing so fast, I would have noticed the error before checking the syntax as the expression was inside an INSERT INTO clause, and the expression was being saved in a integer field.
The opposite mistake, INTQUANT (1), gives the error 'Parameter for function must be of REAL type'. It's a shame that there's no error message for REALQUANT (1.0).
On a slightly different topic, I wanted to see whether the AI program CoPilot can help in writing procedures. I gave it a complete procedure - the one described above - and all CoPilot did was add obvious comments that are totally superfluous. I then asked whether CoPilot could improve the procedure - it introduced new control statements such as WHILE and ENDWHILE that would be great if they were allowed, but sadly no.
Asking CoPilot to write a procedure to give data about items in invoice lines was a waste of time - half of the garbage that CoPilot returned came straight from my original procedure (including linking GENERALLOAD and checking for errors after EXECUTE INTERFACE) and the original half was also garbage.
It seems at the moment that I am better at writing Priority procedures than this albeit free AI program.
In CoPilot's defence, I will note that originally it presented some code written for the Rest API: this code may be correct but I didn't look at it.
