Download User`s Column, January 1982, BYTE Magazine

User's Column ______________________________
Second, the bugs have been fixed. Not that there ever
were many; VULCAN was always excellent, even if in­
furiating.
And finally, the program remains very powerful .
dBASE II isn't just a means of storing and retrieving data.
It contains what amounts to a whole data-handling lan­
guage with the ability to do sorts and restructures, to
copy data from one place to another, and to do condi­
tional arithmetic. For example,
REPLACE ALL FOR (BILL:DATE <
COST WITH COST * 1 . 1
=
VULCAN files and then reshape them into the new
system I've designed. What happens is that dBASE I I
copies the old records into new ones, ignoring any i n the
old database that aren't in the new structure; while if it
finds variables in the new structure that weren't in the old
records, it fills them with blanks, leaving room for you to
enter the data at your leisure.
dBASE II, I'm pleased to say, makes no attempt to pre­
vent you from making backup copies. Far from it: all
through the documentation, you're urged to make a
safety copy of both data and program, just in case. That
advice is worth taking, given the relative costs of data­
entry labor as opposed to floppy disks. I expect people
will try to rip off the dBASE II software, given the price,
but I guarantee they11 get zero use of it without a com­
plete set of documents . . . .
791031)
would b e a command t o search the database t o find
records that had BILL: DATE older than October 31, 1979
and for those records to replace the value of the variable
COST by the current value plus ten percent .
Other forms of magic are possible. You have to study
dBASE II; it can do things you wouldn't think of. But it's
well worth the study. I'm using it to organize my files, by
subject, type, date, date of last access, and drawer
number, and also adding keywords; eventually I1I have
this place organized, and this time for sure. (The last time
I got this ambitious I was using VULCAN, and the
documentation drove me to quit in disgust, but this time
things seem to be going much better . ) And my time
wasn't wasted last year, since dBASE II can read the old
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