Re: Weirdness with EXTDESC, EXTFILE, EXTMBR, and a CPF5152

On 2014-06-19 14:02, James H. H. Lampert wrote:

I plugged your suggestions into a copy of the source (with the actual
call to MMAIL/EMLMSG disabled) and tried it.

It works beautifully, but I still don't understand why
externally-described mode failed, or especially, why it threw a CPF5152
on a write that actually DID make it into the file.

It fails with an externally-described file because that requires the runtime record-format name to match the compile-time format name.

CRTSRCPF always uses the file name as the record format name, so to make that work with an externally-described file, you'd have to compile the program against a file with the same format as the file at runtime.
If you want to externally-describe it, you could create a source file MERCURY/MIMEBODY to use as your EXTDESC file at compile time.

But since all source files start with the same two zoned(6,0) fields and then the data field, it's safe to program-describe them, and a zillion times easier.