Undocumented Pan6 statements: oldselect, oldselectfewer, oldselectadditional, and logic

[CooperT]

I am helping someone convert some Pan6 databases to PanX. I have found several statements that seem to work in Pan6, but do not appear in any of the documentation that I have. I think I have figured out what they are doing, but would still like to see some documentation. Does anyone have such documentation.

[dave]

No documentation, but I found a couple of other topics where this is discussed.

@admin

The oldselect statement is from Panorama 1.x. In those ancient versions, the select statement didn’t use a boolean formula like it does now. To be honest, I don’t remember exactly how the oldselect statement worked, and I don’t have a Panorama 1.0 manual at my fingertips. I did check the Panorama 2 manual just now and it had already changed to the new boolean formula. Off the top of my head, I think oldselect worked like this:

field Name
oldselect contains "Bob"

Which would need to be changed to

select Name contains "Bob"

But I’m not 100% sure on that, I haven’t actually converted any code with oldselect in decades.

What is replacement for "oldSelect" statement in Pan 6

Correct. I believe this changed when Panorama 2 came out in 1991. The original select statement did not support formulas, you could only select based on the current field. I don’t remember the original syntax and I don’t have a Panorama 1.x manual handy. The intention was that retaining the oldselect statement for a while would allow time to transition – ultimately the transition period allowed was more than 25 years before Panorama X finally dropped support for oldselect.

[CooperT]

Wow! This is the oldest DB that I have seen. They were still working in the latest version of Pan6. I am pretty sure that the above explanation is correct, but I will test it against the Pan6 version.
Thanks.