FreeTDS Development Group

["Lowden, James K" <LowdenJK AT bernstein.com>]

> From: Brian Bruns [mailto:camber AT ais.org]
> Sent: August 28, 2002 3:36 PM
>
> I suspect that at some time in the past the DBROWS macro directly mucked
> with the dbprocess to return a result.  The function was probably
> introduced later in an attempt to clean things up, 

Brian, 

Thanks, I see.  You suspect that in making DBPROCESS opaque, Sybase added
functions to get/set things in it, functions whose job was originally done
by macros.  Maybe in some protosybase, there was no macro at all, and you
were expected to address the structure directly?  

> but the dbrows()
> function AFAIK was never published in the documentation and the only
> reason it appears in code is because people look at the 
> headers and short circuit the code, perhaps thinking it will be faster.

There's another reason.  People who spend their days with SQL Server on NT
read Microsoft's documentation (well, some do) and MS's dblib uses lowercase
function names thoughout, no macros provided.  There's an exception:
DBSETLUSER() and friends, the functions that set up the LOGINREC, are all
uppercase.  Go figure.  

My bet is that by the time MS licensed Sybase's 4.2 code, DBROWS() etc. had
already become simple pass-throughs, so MS tossed them out in the name of
incompatibility^Wsimplicity.  Whereas  DBSETLUSER() etc. call dbsetlname()
sparing the user a parameter, so they kept those.  Anyway, that's my
dataless theory.  

Regards, 

--jkl


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