PowerScript Topics

This part describes the basics of using the PowerScript language.

Table of Contents

Language Basics
Comments
Identifier names
Labels
Special ASCII characters
NULL values
Reserved words
Pronouns
Parent pronoun
This pronoun
Super pronoun
Statement continuation
Statement separation
White space
Conditional compilation
Datatypes
Standard datatypes
The Any datatype
System object datatypes
Enumerated datatypes
Declarations
Declaring variables
Where to declare variables
About using variables
Syntax of a variable declaration
Declaring constants
Declaring arrays
Values for array elements
Size of variable-size arrays
More about arrays
Declaring external functions
Datatypes for external function arguments
Calling external functions
Defining source for external functions
Declaring DBMS stored procedures as remote procedure calls
Operators and Expressions
Operators in PowerBuilder
Arithmetic operators in PowerBuilder
Relational operators in PowerBuilder
Concatenation operator in PowerBuilder
Operator precedence in PowerBuilder expressions
Datatype of PowerBuilder expressions
Numeric datatypes in PowerBuilder
String and char datatypes in PowerBuilder
Structures and Objects
About structures
About objects
About user objects
Instantiating objects
Using ancestors and descendants
Garbage collection
User objects that behave like structures
Assignment for objects and structures
Assignment for structures
Assignment for objects
Assignment for autoinstantiated user objects
Calling Functions and Events
About functions and events
Finding and executing functions and events
Finding functions
Finding events
Triggering versus posting functions and events
Static versus dynamic calls
Static calls
Dynamic calls
Overloading, overriding, and extending functions and events
Overloading and overriding functions
Extending and overriding events
Passing arguments to functions and events
Passing objects
Passing structures
Passing arrays
Using return values
Functions
Events
Using cascaded calling and return values
Syntax for calling PowerBuilder functions and events
Calling functions and events in an object's ancestor