Analytica 5.0 beta Release Notes/Changes in 5.0.16

This page lists changes in Analytica 5.0 beta (and ADE 5.0 beta) build 5.0.16 since build 5.0.15. Build 5.0.16 is expected to be the last build of the 5.0 beta testing period.

Plus or Sum on Text

Several beta testers experienced the following error message when running their 4.6 models in 5.0:

These same models experience this as a warning in 4.6, if you haven't disabled the Show result warnings preference.

If you are indeed using the plus operator for text concatenation, then by all means change it in your model! But, in many cases, the models were doing something similar to the following:

If IsNumber(x) Then x+1 Else 0

Because Analytica evaluates the Then part as an array operation (when x has a combination of numbers and non-numbers), some addition operations on text values are encountered, even though the value isn't used in the final result.

With the changes in this build, you can easily get around this problem now without having to make any changes to your model. Specifically:

• We've added a new preference setting: Turn on the "x+y" returns NAN for Text. When this is on, "hello" + "world" evaluates to NaN, with no error or warning.

  Turn the preference on to eliminate the problem in models that don't actually use the result of the + operator applied to text.

  If your model really does use + or Sum for text concatenation, you'll see NaN in your computed results. In that case, you'll want to change your model to use & and JoinText.

• The Turn on the "x+y" returns NAN for Text preference is on by default for new models created in 5.0. We expect this behavior to be the standard going forward.
• The Turn on the "x+y" returns NAN for Text preference starts in the off state when you load a legacy model. The appearance of the error once let's you know there might be an issue.
  • The option to turn on the Turn on the "x+y" returns NAN for Text preference now appears right on the error message itself, making it super easy to turn on, and many cases, to subvert the issue entirely.

Icons

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