Recent changes in Harbour and xharbour

[Antonio Linares]

Recently several important changes have been implemented in Harbour and xharbour and it is important to know about them as they require some changes in the C code you may be using.

The idea of these changes is that the programmers don't manipulate internal structures directly. Everything turn into handles (like in Windows). No more . and -> use. Its a very good idea because it turns Harbour/xharbour very robust and it avoids possible bugs in the code, and Harbour/xharbour can be modified as much as needed without affecting our C code in the future.

Basically we can not declare HB_ITEM structures in our C code, and we have to manage PHB_ITEM pointers as pointers to void (void *). So instead of doing pItem->type we have to do hb_itemType( pItem ) to get the same value. This way we don't manipulate the structure pointed by pItem.

The same happens with pDynSym->pSymbol. Now we have to use
hb_dynsymSymbol( pDynSym ).

Please review your C code and make the required changes.

If you don't change your C code you will experience that your application suddenly quits, without errors or warnings.

The Harbour and xharbour february builds are already available from:
www.fivetechsoft.com/files/harbour.exe (harbourm.exe Microsoft)
www.fivetechsoft.com/files/xharbour.exe (xharbourm.exe Microsoft)