If you’ve ever had to work with the STYLE or STYLE_EX properties in OpenInsight you’ve probably had to write some gnarly code like this to get around the strange way it returns a string containing a C-style hex representation such as “0x8234ABDB”:

style = iconv( get_Property( object, "STYLE" )[3,8], "MX" )

We’ll probably never know the reason the original authors of OpenInsight decided to implement the property like this, but with version 10 we’ve provided a pair of new properties called “STYLE_N” and “STYLE_EX_N” that return the numeric (decimal) representation of a control’s style directly thereby saving the need for the extra parsing.