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What are INIT and EXIT procedures? Why do I care?

April 26, 2017init procedures

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What are INIT and EXIT procedures? Why do I care?

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A procedure declared as INIT PROCEDURE will always execute on program startup before the main procedure is executed. A procedure declared as EXIT PROCEDURE will likewise execute just after the main procedure terminates. INIT PROCEDUREs are useful if you have STATIC variable initializations that cannot be done inline. Both INIT and EXIT PROCEDUREs are handy for generalized setup and cleanup in a module that you want to make fully independent of the calling program. INIT FUNCTION works the same as INIT PROCEDURE, and EXIT FUNCTION works the same as EXIT PROCEDURE. Their return values are ignored though. Clipper makes no guarantees as to the order of execution of INIT and EXIT procedures. On this point, Clayton Neff writes: If you have 3 or 4 INIT functions, you don’t have any control over the order in which they are called. Since the RDD setup routines are also in an INIT function, Clipper won’t necessarily have set up the RDD system before your INIT function is called. Thi