RE: Procedure Problem -- RPG400-L

I must admit I wasn't paying close attention at the beginning of this discussion since the whole concept of procedures just seems like a new and confusing way of slicing the bread.

But this fascinates me. You are suggesting that RPG now has the ability to figure out the length of a field? The implication is that we could then write a procedure to which we could pass a 150 character string and it could center 5 fields of 30 characters each, or 3 fields of 50 characters each, based only upon the content of the 150 character string?

_______________________
Booth Martin
boothm@earth.goddard.edu
http://www.spy.net/~booth
_______________________

"Ron Hawkins" <hwarangron@home.com>
Sent by: owner-rpg400-l@midrange.com

12/24/1999 01:28 PM
Please respond to RPG400-L

To: <RPG400-L@midrange.com>
cc:
Subject: RE: Procedure Problem

You put the data to be centered in a field and pass the field. It returns it centered. You shouldn't have to tell the procedure the length of the field, it can figure it out.
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-rpg400-l@midrange.com [mailto:owner-rpg400-l@midrange.com]On Behalf Of boothm@earth.goddard.edu
Sent: Thursday, December 23, 1999 6:44 PM
To: RPG400-L@midrange.com
Subject: RE: Procedure Problem

How would the procedure know what length to center your character in, if you didn't in some way tell the procedure the size of the field that you want to hold the centered text?
_______________________
Booth Martin
boothm@earth.goddard.edu
http://www.spy.net/~booth
_______________________

"Ron Hawkins" <hwarangron@home.com>
Sent by: owner-rpg400-l@midrange.com

12/23/1999 08:53 PM
Please respond to RPG400-L

To: <RPG400-L@midrange.com>
cc:
Subject: RE: Procedure Problem

It seems to me that with a procedure to center a field, descriptors are the
only way to go. You need to be able to pass any size character field. You
would not want to center a numeric field, nor a constant, only character
fields. So you only have to get the size of a character field. The user
should not have to pass the size of the field.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-rpg400-l@midrange.com [mailto:owner-rpg400-l@midrange.com]On
Behalf Of Jon.Paris@halinfo.it
Sent: Thursday, December 23, 1999 10:23 AM
To: RPG400-L@midrange.com
Subject: RE: Procedure Problem

When I re-read this I remembered why I leant in this direction. Unless you are
asking the programmer to only receive the centered result into the original
input field or into a field of identical size (both of which require the kind of
knowledge of the routine that you are trying to avoid) you cannot use an Eval'd
function for a generic centering routine unless a) you have one routine for each
possible length of output field - again requiring knowledge or b) Use CallP and
pass the output field as a parameter and use descriptors to work out how long it
is.

The original example used Eval and so I went with that direction.