Re: Prototypes and parameters

[Hans Boldt <boldt@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Tom Liotta wrote:
> Barbara:
>
> Can you clarify one thing? What do you mean by "which would not work" when you speak about a pointer for a varying length field? Is that to mean such an address cannot be passed? or that the called procedure could not correctly return a value without messing things up in the calling procedure? Would that still be strictly true even if both caller and callee used an agreed length, e.g., the caller set the length appropriately before the call? I've never looked at what would happen for a varying length field in this case; this makes me curious.
>
> Thanks.
Basically, if you pass a pointer as a parameter, both caller and
callee *must* agree on what the pointer points to, in terms of data
type, format, length, decimal positions, CCSID, etc. If the API
expects a pointer to a fixed length character string, passing the
address of a varying length character variable won't work, since the
address would point to the 2-byte length prefix.

Cheers!  Hans