questions on *date and *export

[Mark Shinwell]

On Thu, Aug 24, 2006 at 05:40:45PM +0200, Thomas Holder wrote:
> Why is it necessary to export points?

It prevents against accidental connection of a survey to a point that
it was not intended to be connected to.  (This also makes the person
inputting the data actually think carefully about the connections :-)

Explicitly-exported points are useful when you have a complicated
survey, or group of surveys, to which you wish to assign "exterior"
connection points.  The "interior" connection points are all kept hidden
by virtue of not being exported, and you can re-arrange these connections
without worrying about anything that might be connected to the "external"
points.  Whilst you can do a similar thing just using *equate, you don't
get the benefit of error messages when you try to connect to the
innards.

Mark