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Hello,
If IBM changes the max length of variable length fields (and DS, and
regular fields) to 16MB, then I suspect that they will increase the
hidden length attribute to 10I0 or 10U0. Which would mean "4" would
be the, then, correct magic number.
Gosh, if IBM changes the prefix from a 2-byte field to a 4-byte field, I
sure hope they provide a different data type, so that we have VARYING
and BIGVARYING or VARYING4 or something like that.
I'd hate to think that they'll arbitrarily change the way the VARYING
keyword works all of a sudden in some release. Because I use socket
and IFS APIs a lot, I often code things like %addr(Field)+2, and
%size(Field)-2 for things like the read() and recv() API.
If they say something like "fields less than 64k use 2 bytes, fields
greater than 64k use 4 bytes" then I think we'll lose some advantages as
well. It might be nice to have a subproecedure that today accepts a
field that's 1k long as a parameter, but next year, it might need to be
increased to 100k. I'd hate to have to recompile every single caller
because the prefix size changed from 2 bytes to 4 bytes. I'd like to be
able to force the prefix size to 4 bytes, even for small fields!
Plus, there are existing tools that use a 4-byte prefix. For example,
the scratchpad option used in SQL UDFs is always prefixed by a 4-byte
binary length. It'd be nice to have the option to use a VARYING4 (or
whatever) field for this sort of thing rather than being forced to use a
data structure and do the work manually. If IBM automatically adjusts
the prefix size based on field length, we'd only be able to use VARYING
when the field is long, not when it's short, which would be inconvienient.
The point of all of this... it should be reasonable to use a constant
for the length of 2 or 4, since the data type should be clearly
specified at compile-time. I agree that a BIF of some sort might make
the code easier to read, but I *sure* hope that IBM doesn't
automatically adjust the length of the prefix for VARYING. Give us
control over that!!
midrange.com
