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On Wed, 9 Oct 2002, Steve Richter wrote: > > Its just a hunch of mine. C relies on null term strings so I am speculating > that ILE handles them efficiently. > Yes, I'm familiar with C, since I program in it on Unix machines. Normally, though, when you pass a string in C you pass a pointer. I don't think I've EVER seen a C function that passes a string by value. In fact, it's very difficult to pass a string by value in C. I'm not evern sure that you CAN without using a data structure... Normally you'd do something like this: int myfunc(const char *input, char *output, int size); Which means that the input is a pointer to a null-terminated string, passed as "const" (so you can't change it in the function) the output is also a pointer to a null-terminated string. This would be equivalent to the following RPG prototype: D myfunc PR 10I 0 D input * value options(*string) D output * value options(*string) D size 10I 0 value See? You're passing the strings by pointer, i.e. by reference. So you really can't compare it to a varying field passed by value. To pass by value in C you'd have to do something like: #include <stdio.h> struct stuff { char mystring[32000]; }; int myfunc(struct stuff t) { printf("%s\n", t.mystring); return 0; } int main(void) { struct stuff b; strcpy(b.mystring, "This got passed by value!"); return 0; } So, that's about the same thing as: D myfunc PR 10I 0 D string 32000A value Even though the string is "variable length" (i.e. null-terminated) in C, it still copies all 32000 bytes. So I would expect it to actually be less efficient than the RPG counterpart. I suppose I could write up a benchmark and try it... but this message is already getting long :) At any rate, nobody EVER passes strings by value in C. So, I SERIOUSLY doubt you'd find it more efficient than RPG.
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