Re: Varying fields as parameters on procedure calls.

Alan,

Can you point to this article you're referring to? I'd like to understand what you're referring to.

There's nothing magic about VARYING data types -- they work the same as any other data type. When you pass by VALUE the variable is copied -- the whole thing is copied, so if you had 1000A VARYING, it'd copy 1002 bytes from the caller to the procedure. When passed by reference (i.e. no VALUE keyword) than a pointer (16 bytes) is passed instead, and it shares the same memory as the caller.

Personally, because I often interface with other languages like C, C++, SQL, etc I would never pass a character string by value. Many languages don't allow it (or allow it, but make it difficult, for instance in C you have to use a data structure to pass a a character string by value.) So I would avoid passing a string by value... (I only use value for numerics)

The article you're referring to may be referring to something like return values, maybe? I would like to see it to understand it...

-SK


On 4/10/2015 6:13 PM, Alan Campin wrote:

Just a quick question. I was reading on article on the web and it stated
that if I had a varying fields that what would get passed by VALUE would be
just the first two digits for the length and the actual length of the data.

It has always been my understanding if I had field that was 64K varying and
I passed it as a parameter that the 64K plus two (or four) bytes for the
length is what would be passed even I only had say 10 bytes of data.

Since a statement like InParm = *ALL'*'; is valid even though it would
never be seen by the caller, I don't see any other way it could work except
to the pass the entire length.

I can pass as *VARSIZE but only if a CONST or by reference or I can pass as
*STRING with an optional *TRIM which is what I have been doing lately.