LotusScript's List bug strikes again

Last week i was working with a LotusScript agent which uses List data type for storing text values. The agent was not working properly as it could not find matching values in the second list(which was populated with the same listtags as the first list). I suspected it was something wrong with processing of List, but couldn't find what part of the code was wrong, as I got no error messages. The List was more than 1000 elements and in the debugger I could only see about 200 first elements, which was not very helpful. I have earlier experienced similar problem with IsNull(mylist("listtag")) function, but in this agent there were no such IsNull checks (use IsElement instead of IsNull). After 2 hours of commenting parts of the code out, I finally found what was wrong. The fact of calling tst procedure with nonexistant list value mylist("b") as parameter, creates "b" list element with value ""! It does not generate "List item does not exist" error message as one would expect!

I have hard to think that it works "as designed", as a programmer clearly doesn't want to create a new list element by simply passing it to a procedure.
Using IsElement(mylist("b")) before calling the procedure/function helps to avoid the problem, but that shouldn't be necessary, as the programmer expects an error if the List element does not exist.

Sub Initialize
Dim mylist List As String
mylist("a")="a"
' Msgbox mylist("b") 'properly results in error "List item does not exist"

Call tst(mylist("b")) 'erroneously creates "b" list element

' Msgbox Isnull(mylist("b")) 'erroneously creates "b" list element

Msgbox mylist("b") 'shows "" as list value for "b" instead of an error

End Sub

Sub tst(tmp)

End Sub



Tags: LotusScript