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The use of a - number in a display statement was a kind of special purpose hack that, indded, seemed to fix a vary obscure issue by invisiably getting the "windows message pump" to run for a short amount of time.
The basic issue was that a MSIE browser control was hacked into a WinBatch dialog, on on some kind of Dialog Callback event, a webpage was loaded into the control, and then asked to scroll down a bit.
It *almost* worked. Via trial and error it was found that doing a normal display statement, all the desired work got done, as in order to load a webpage into the control and then instruct it to scroll down, in a dialog callback required much more message processing than was imaginable.
Although it kind of worked, the display statement popping up was quite distracting.
It turns out that the Display statement is a kind of complicated TimeDelay, except that TimeDelay is fairly simple, and Display is fairly complex in comparision.
Anyway, in short it was decided that just feeding the display a negative number as a instruction to do all the work involved in a display, but to make the window it pops up invisible would be the most straightforward way to solve the above problem.
In, oh, maybe 15 years nothing quite like this isse has ever been seen. Thus we do not expect that abyone else would be interested in this tidbit of functionality.
But it's there for the next person that needs it.
Article ID: W16968
File Created: 2007:07:03:14:27:24
Last Updated: 2007:07:03:14:27:24