As I was reviewing some of the WORKS message board posts the other day, I came across a discussion that focused on the known problems of floating point arithmetic. This has been addressed over the years within the Revelation community but it continues to haunt developers (especially those who are converting R/Basic code to Basic+ and are wondering why their math doesn’t work as well…) To summarize the problem, run the following code in Basic+:

A = 1.07625
B = 1.0762
C = A - B

The result will be:

5.00000000001055E-5

Which is the same as:

.0000500000000001055
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Our new blog article has a two-fold purpose. First, we want to review a few of the new command line switches that will be introduced with OpenInsight 10. Second, we are pleased to announce a minor enhancement to our SRP Application Launcher tool, which nicely complements our first purpose!

Command line switches are a common feature of OpenInsight. Probably every shortcut to a production OpenInsight application uses one or more of the following switches: /AP, /UN, /PW, and /DV. Without these switches it would be hard to create an application shortcut that is unique to the end user’s system. Revelation saw fit to take this further by adding even more switches that customize the way OpenInsight applications are launched.

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Shortly after Revelation released news of their support for alpha channel images, they released a companion article documenting other improvements to their image API. This introduced seven new properties (IMAGEALIGN, IMAGECOLORKEY, IMAGEFRAMECOUNT, IMAGEFRAMENUMBER, IMAGESIZE, IMAGESTYLE, and IMAGETRANSLUCENCY) and one new method (SETIMAGE). In like fashion we will explore some of the more advanced features of the SRP Picture control and compare them to these new properties and new method that will be introduced in OpenInsight 10.

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When we recently wrote about our excitement over the upcoming release of OpenInsight 10, we announced that we would be publishing articles that would help current and future SRP customers enjoy many of the future advances of OpenInsight 10 with their existing OpenInsight 8 and 9 systems. In other words, the future is now. In our first article in this series we will review OpenInsight 10 improvements in the area of image transparency and explain how these can be implemented today using SRP technology.

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SRP Utilities was recently upgraded to 1.4.5 and now includes a new function called SRP_Trim. This new feature is like the Basic+ Trim function on steroids! You can read more about how it works in the SRP_Trim reference page. We would be remiss to not also mention the SRP Utilities 1.4.4 update that happened just a few days before 1.4.5. It included an improvement for SRP_Math, specifically the RANDOM service. Previously, RANDOM would only return a value between 0.0 and 1.0, requiring additional logic to generate a custom range of values. With this new version, you can now set a specific range you wish to receive a random number from. For more information, you can review the SRP_Math – RANDOM wiki page.

As always, the SRP Utilities are free for you to download and enjoy!