My Favorite Programming Term

Posted on Thursday, October 7th, 2010 at 8:20 pm in

For a, thankfully, very brief time I was exposed to ‘Uniface’, the supposed ‘universal’ programming language currently offered by Compuware (in the early 2000’s). It does, however, make use of my now favorite programming term: $hits.

From this source. (link gone dark)

3.3 setocc, currocc, totdbocc, $hits
3.3.1 Why should I be careful about using $hits and what alternatives are there?

Whenever $hits is referenced in proc code in Uniface, Uniface is forced to complete the hitlist in order to evaluate the proc statement. The problem is that Uniface does not know how many records are in the complete query result set until it completes the hit list. While the impact of this in small entities is minimal, the typical problem comes when a system goes to production and there are thousands of records in the hit list. This takes time and so the use of $hits will slow performance.

A college of mine and I thought they should refer to the ‘hitlist’ as the ‘$hitlist’ as it would be more descriptive.

Uniface can be enjoyed here.

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