Communicator 3000 MPE/iX Release 6.0 (Platform Software Release C.60.00) (30216-90269)

70 Chapter 5

Application Development

Transact V and Transact/iX Enhancements

by Kelly Sznaider

Support Technology Lab

Overview

Two new enhancements have been added to Transact/V as of version

A.11.00 and also to Transact/iX as of version A.06.00:

• Literal strings and numeric constants can now be passed as

parameters in the PROC verb.

• Transact now provides a method for increased decimal precision in

arithmetic expressions.

New Parameter Types

The parameter list for the PROC statement has two additional types of

parameters. A programmer-deﬁned character string can be passed by

placing the string within quotes, similar to other languages. The

default is to pass this literal as a 16-bit address. To change the literal to

a byte address, precede the string with a "%", the same as with

variables. The other parameter type is to pass a numeric value. The

numeric constant is passed by value.

Examples:

PROC ASCII (65, 10, %"abc", &(numchar));

PROC FWRITE (#FILEID(TRANOUT), "Hello", -5, 0);

Increased Decimal Precision

The second Transact enhancement increases decimal precision in

arithmetic expressions (IF, LET, REPEAT, and WHILE verbs) via the

new !PRECISION compiler command. A speciﬁed minimum number of

decimal places is maintained for all packed-decimal intermediate

results when calculating the value of an arithmetic expression. This

minimum number is used only if the expression's default evaluation

method would have maintained fewer decimal places.

Example:

!PRECISION(5) maintains at least five decimal places.

Documentation

The detailed information for these enhancements has been included in

the HP Transact Documentation Update Notice, which is also included

in the latest edition of the HP Transact Reference Manual. A revised HP

Transact Quick Reference Guide is also available.