Can't GetNthRecord using a variable

[The Shadow]

I believe the 800 digits might be the full amount that can be indexed. The rule was the various calc-engine functions are free to return NaN (not a number, ie "?") if they happen to notice this limit being exceeded, (but they are not required to notice as long as the answer returned is correct instead).

[comment]

That just might explain the paradox of $j ≠ $j * 1.

But I am curious: why do some function place seemingly arbitrary limits on their parameters, e.g. 2^15 for the Date() function?

[The Shadow]

I think the idea is that:

  Date( 1; 2^16; 2007 )

is much more likely to be developer error than a real request. Date's are also limited to years <= 4000 for a similar reason.

Admittedly, there is also some "laziness" coming into play here, why spend an extra day writing code to ensure the day and month arguments can go up to 10^400 when 99.999% of all the users would never use this feature anyway, but it would still have to be tested.

Edited June 9, 2007 by Guest
one more thing...

[comment]

Thanks. I thought you were going to say it's a limitation of the perpetual calendar algorithm, or something like that. The actual limit is 32,767 (2^15 - 1), and that's not that many days - less than 90 years or, if you like, about 2.25% of the Filemaker date span.

[Genx]

Hmmmm,

All very interesting. Thanks for the great discussion (and yell at alex time guys.

[comment]

Surely you meant to say "yell at Alex any time"?

[Genx]

: lol, that's all i have to say at this point.

[Genx]

I thought I might dig this up for no apparent reason.. but looking at the FM 8 tech specs:

Number: Support values from 10^-400 up to 10^400 and the negative values of the same range. Index based on the first 400 significant digits. Up to 1 billion characters per field. The first 400 digits are indexed.

It would sort of make sense to allow array addressing up to that point as well... but then again maybe not... but a potential way to check and take into account the possibility of truncation is perhaps to address one at 10^400 and one at 10^400-1 then try to retrieve those values.

But i forget what other issues we came accross in our discussions so I'm just going to leave it there.