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At 03:41 PM 8/24/2007, Simon Dawson wrote:
>The reason I posted was simply to summarise a few interesting behaviours I'd discovered. None of it will be news to the more experienced or attentive TS users on the list, such as yourself (there was a reason I included you in my list of people I'm grateful to for contributing so much to the list, although I regret not also mentioning Alex) - however, I merely aimed to help those less familiar, a summary of a few "traps for young players", if you will.
Thanks.
I do wish that there was a complete list of all the things we need to watch out for in using TradeStation. All programmable applications have some quirky things you need to work around. (I know since I used to design them... :-) ) In retrospect, some of them seem strange and you wonder why they don't get fixed but there is a reason.
The problem is that when you first design the "architecture" for a new software application, you do not really understand the requirements completely. Then customers begin to use the application and write programs using the features. From then on, you are "locked into" the old architecture because if you change it, all the old code of your installed base, (your most valuable asset), becomes obsolete!
Still, I am amazed at how well the original TradeStation architecture has stood up over time and how simple EasyLanguage programs are compared with many other platforms. Just compare the code for the various platforms that appear in Stocks & Commodities Magazine for the same "indicator" that is described in an article. The code for many other popular programs is often 2 to 3 times longer and very difficult to understand.
I had to decipher an indicator written for ESignal recently. There were two pages of code for what I was able to convert to 6 lines of TradeStation code.
So let's not be overly critical when we find something that seems not right. These are usually a well known issue by both experienced users and TradeStation. They would certainly fix them if they could do so without wrecking all the existing code. They have fixed hundreds of things since TS200i.
There is always a "work-around" so just ask on the list and lot of people will tell you how to avoid the problem.
Bob Fulks
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