Shareware Grab Bag/Shareware Grab Bag.iso/001/reflcomm.tqt/reflcomm.txt

Text File | 1986-02-13 | 10KB | 253 lines

                                                   Craig Roberts

      Comments about Reflex, Borland International/ANALYTICA

   REFLEX, Borland/Analytica, requires CGA or Hercules mono vid board and
640K; hard disk helpful. List: $99.95, street, under $60.

This is a much more technical review than what is normally on
LawCAT.  Some of the features I question may be evident on the
REFLEX demo package.  Just because I am critical of REFLEX and
ask a lot of it doesn't mean I wouldn't buy it again.  I could be
just as critical of PC-FILE III, for instance.  I must admit that
I have been doing a good bit of multi-file relational dBASE III
programming recently, so I am asking a lot of my databases.

 1.  Reflex is a good product and provides excellent value
for the price ($60 to 100).  However, I do not feel it is a
mature product at this time and sincerely hope that
Borland/ANALYTICA take the challenge of producing a Version 2
(and charge a $50 to 60 upgrade cost) that will encorporate a
level of features and enhancements that will make this product
the equal of Turbo Pascal, Sidekick, and Superkey.

2.  A software package the size of REFLEX almost begs for a hard
disk.  I think software authors should begin to push the user
into upgrading their systems to 640 K and hard disks by providing
software which best utilizes "full system" configurations.
Memory chips and boards are cheap and the increased performance
from a hard disk make REFLEX much nicer to use.


Questions about on system configuration:

3.  The Reflex manual suggests that a file is limited to those
records which can fit in memory.  Is this true?

4.  Will Reflex utilize the LOTUS standard for extended memory???
And, does it use an 8087, if installed?

5.  Do I get more rows of information on the screen with an
Hercules board than with the 640 by 200 IBM hi-res graphics?


What about the problems with co-resident programs?

6.  Will REFLEX (or TURBOPASCAL, LIGHTNING, SIDEKICK, etc) run
with WINDOWS, TOPVIEW, DoubleDos?  What limitations occur?

7.  SUPERKEY does not display its command menu in graphics mode,
but instead changes the display mode to (color) character mode.
Then when a macro is constructed, the graphics mode of REFLEX
turns the SUPERKEY information into a line of dots across the
screen.  Will Borland be releasing an update to SuperKey?


What about other nice features of DOS and REFLEX?

8.  REFLEX does not easily use the subdirectory structure.  I
(like many others) like to set the programs in one directory,
then access files in another, usually the default drive &
directories. SUPERKEY does this very well, so why not REFLEX?

9.  I was hoping REFLEX was a relational data base program.

As a computer scientist and sociologist, I was pleased to find
the reference to data base NORMALIZATION.  However, the two and a
half pages leave me with an appetite for an enhanced, relational
REFLEX.

10.  Some of the features of relational data bases are important
to implement when files are merged.  At the least, REFLEX doesn't
seem to support merging files in a relational manner so that
fields from specific records from a second file are joined with
the right records on the main file.  The requirements about the
format of the data base (matching records and field lengths)
seems overly restrictive in a product trying to be as flexible as
possible. In addition, there seems to be no easy way to compare
the data base structures.  I can't find a "print field
definitions" command.


Questions about the main REFLEX program.

Data-related.

11.  How do I duplicate a record?

12.  How do I duplicate a field from the previous record?

13.  Redefining the search field is time consuming.  This problem
is most evident if I want to look up Roberta Smith, then Raul
Ramos, etc.  I have overcome this with a SuperKey macro, but
macros are difficult to create in graphics modes....


REPEATING FIELD

14.  During data entry, how creating a window which displays the
previously repeating field entries?  You could listen to my keys,
then give the alphabetized entries currently available.  By using
F10, it is (on the non-5051) keyboards close enough to "normal"
keys to be hit easily.  If I have entered enough identifying
characters, grab the match & display it & move on to the next
field.  If not, show me the alphabetized entries possible so far.
Arrow keys or another key or two could select the entry....

I'm using repeating fields for an ORIGIN field for a folkdance
tape index and will, of course, save space but still need quick
ways to enter the names such as "Macedonian", "Balkan", etc.  Of
course, I am have created a Superkey macro for these but it would be
nice to have the function available in an OPTIONS-like window.


SORT

15.  Sort doesn't seem to be up to the TOOLBOX-like speed I
expect from a resident data base.  Maybe I have been spoiled by
TURBO (CP/M, Versions 1 & 2, & MS/PC DOS Version 3) and Sidekick.

Why not use an internal flags to prevent re-Sorting an unchanged
database (like Turbo's "Do you want to Save your file?" before
Quiting)?


GRAPH

16.  When returning from a tool, GRAPH view always has to
regenerate itself, taking a long time (by BORLAND standards).
Why? & Why won't non-automatic recalculation option reset this?


CROSSTAB

17.  I strongly suggest that Borland add statistical functions to
a rudamentary crosstabulation feature.

The quickest addition should be to the CROSSTAB view.  For a
sociologist, a two-variable cross tabulation is not enough.  I
know, I can create manually the different headings and columns to
generate a multiple variable comparison table.  But multiple
variable comparisons could be easily generated by adding under
the For Each.. (Crosstab option) a option that doesn't erase the
current column settings but adds to them.  REFLEX already has 70
% of the code for this type of function, so why not go on and add
the additional whistles & bells?

I recently created with another micro stat package and SIDEKICK a
table which looked like this:

Type                     Boys          Girls          All Youth
of Home              <13 13+  All   <13 13+  All     <13 13+  All
Both Parents
One Parent/Stepparent
Single Mother
Single Father   etc.

And I percentaged down and showed the total number of kids in
each category at the bottom of a column.

I would like to see a number of other statistics used by REFLEX:
   1.  Regression, product-moment correlation, etc.
   2.  Analysis of variance
   3.  Tests of significance, maybe....
   4.  Loglinear analysis would fit in great with this REFLEX's
   ability to generate tables in real time.
   5.  Frequencies function
   6.  Cluster, discriminate, and factor analysis techniques
   would be very nice.

Of course I would expect to use an 8087 for all this....


REFLEX2

18.  Most obvious is the lack of a truely integerated package in
which REFLEX2 functions are called from the main (REFLEX)
program. Exiting Reflex, then entering Reflex2 is a pain.


REPORT FUNCTION

19.  The report writer is swift and simple.  Almost too simple.

It would be nice to add comment lines to a report - where things
came from, etc.  This adds to the self-documenting nature of the
beast....

20.  How can I include PRINTER CONTROLS in the middle of a
report?

21.  How can I copy part of one report to another place in the
same report?  To/from another report?

22.  I would like linewise conditional paragraphs (groups of
lines), conditional lines, etc.  These could be added with the
present functions and an ability to "enter" these as
modifications to the WHEN PRINTED COLUMN.

23.  I like REFLEX's ability to use up to 255 characters to
define a single character field.  However the lack of conditional
variables makes it necessary to repeat identical conditional
statements character for character if they are used more than
once....

24.  I would like a @conditional page  (give a page iff not
enough lines remain) special field.

25.  A Center-justification attribute would be nice for an entire
line containing several individual fields including Text and data
fields.

26.  Why does retrieving/saving REPORT DESIGN take so long?  On
this and other functions (even in Sidekick's ^QA command) it
would be nice to show a "wait..." with some sign of progress.


TRANSLATE FUNCTION

27.  Translate specification is nice but...

The carry-over of the file from one specification to another is
handy but this feature interferes with the application of one
TRANSLATE SPEC to several files.  This is particularly a royal
pain when one is trying to edit several small (sidekick sized)
chunks of files which will be appended just prior to a large
translate.

28.  Also, how can I read/retrieve separately/print (other than
in slow DOS-graph form) a TRANSLATE SPEC??  Sometimes the
graphics display mode is a pain.....

29.  Any character (for start) seems to pick up the leading
quote, something I don't like.

30.  You give me a picture of the first record quite nicely but
you don't carry the concept out to the fullest extent.  As soon
as I define names, the "sample" fields disappear.  If REFLEX2 was
an overlay file rather than a separate COM file, I examine the
records in their original form with the LIST view after 5
records, then go back to examining the REPORT.


MERGE FUNCTION

31.  You place a requirement that the fields must be defined in
identical order in different data bases.  Without easy acess to
altering the field definitions from the MERGE function, this is
awkward at worse and difficult at best.