Re: MCH3601

[Barbara Morris <bmorris@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Carel Teijgeler wrote:
>
> --
> Mark,
>
> I think passing arrays to procedures should be treated similar as passing
> datastructures to a procedure: that can only be done with based-on
> pointers, AFAIK.
>

Carel, if you pass arrays to procedures by reference or CONST, there is
an implicit based-on pointer.  There's no need to mess around with
explicit pointers.

But there's no particular restriction on arrays by value, nor on
returning arrays.  It may be less efficient to do this because of the
extra copying involved in passing by value or returning values, but it's
not wrong, and the compiler can handle it.

Regarding passing data structures by passing a pointer, that was one way
of getting around the problem that the compiler wouldn't treat a
prototyped parameter as a data structure.  That problem has been removed
in V5R1 with LIKEDS, so now you can pass data structures directly to
procedures.  (It's still more efficient to pass them by reference or
CONST though.)