RE: CL pgm and pointer variables

["Steve Richter" <srichter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-admin@midrange.com [mailto:rpg400-l-admin@midrange.com]On
Behalf Of Hans Boldt

>First, data pointers won't help one bit for conversion of
>unstructured character strings to a numeric type. You still need to
>use a %DEC or atoll() function. On the other hand, data pointers
>could be used in the assignment of numeric values to numeric targets
>with precisions unknown at compile time.

true. but that just begs the question of why a more generic MI CPY
instruction could not be provided when the target is a data pointer. The
important aspect of the data pointer is that it enables the procedure to do
more work.


>(Oh yeah, if you want
>"%DataLength(variable)" and "%DataPrecision(variable)" built-in
>functions, have a look at %LEN and %DECPOS.)

thanks.  I did not know of %decpos.  What about %DataType, esp since opdesc
does not give data type as would be expected?


have a good LOA,

Steve Richter