I was coding in the wee hours and apparently felt particularly sloppy with the code I was writing. I ended up writing something similar to this.
DEF THING
VAR T%
'does some stuff
RETURN T%
END
It took me far too long to find the actual issue with this code because the compiler has some trouble deciding what to do sometimes. If you haven't noticed the issue yet, don't feel bad, the parser didn't either.
The
DEF THING is a command, and the code was written so that it would return a value. Despite the fact that
commands can't return anything, this compiles perfectly fine!
The bug is this:
if you try to use a RETURN statement in a command- or OUT-form DEF to return either a variable or a label, the compiler acts as if it's a bare RETURN statement (you're returning nothing.)
This is in fact a compile-time and not a run-time bug because if you enable
OPTION STRICT and a variable is specified, it doesn't even check if the variable exists! The compiler just throws out whatever variable you passed to the
RETURN.
When I say it has to be either a label or a variable, I mean this exactly. Trying to pass a number or a string throws
Syntax error, as it should.
It should be noted that using a
RETURN without an argument is perfectly legal in a command or
OUT; it simply exits the
DEF, as with a
GOSUB.
Upon execution, the
DEF behaves as you would expect, because commands don't return anything and the compiler just throws out the return value.
