T
Thomas Mercer-Hursh
Guest
To reinforce what Tom has said ... this being an area where we agree! ... one of the key bad things about FIND FIRST is not so much that the program will behave incorrectly as what you are communicating to any future developer who has to deal with the code (which might be you, 10 years later, when you have forgotten everything about the code. If you find the first record in a group and treat it specially, then you have violated normal form. So, CAN-FIND is fine because you are merely determining whether a given set is null or not and you don't care about the count as long as it is not zero. But, the minute you so much as use a value from the record which happens to come first, you are treating that record as special and are violating normal form. Storing something in it is even worse. And, if the specified criteria are sufficient to uniquely identify a record, so the issue about one of a set does not exist, then using FIND FIRST communicates to the later programmer that there is a set, which is not true.
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