Re: BIF's question.

[bmorris@xxxxxxxxxx]

>Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 08:27:29 -0400
>From: jpcarr@TREDEGAR.COM
>
>>What happens if you then change the length of the field back to 6?
>
>Suprisingly  I think you will see the '12345'  again.   I don't think
>it should work this way.
> ...

It doesn't work that way ...

The reasoning is that the value of bytes after the current length
is undefined.  (For example, the compiler doesn't initialize the
whole field, or copy the whole field from the buffer on input.)

Anyway, if the length of a varying field is increased, the additional
characters are set to blanks.

This behaviour can be awkward if you actually want the data to stay
the same and the length to go up and down, but we thought it would
be more usual that programmers would have garbage in those bytes
and would not always be lucky enough to find out about the random
garbage in their fields during testing rather than after putting
their code into production).

Barbara Morris, IBM Toronto Lab, RPG Compiler Development


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