Re: Pointer suggestion

[Tony Carolla <carolla@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Tom

<snip>
> I know in writing a standard program I could pass parms defined as arrays,
> but I think that this could be done using pointers. I have used limited
> pointer logic with existing subprocs.
</snip>

I don't really see any advantage of doing this task with pointers. 
You might use a user space to store the data, but that wouldn't speed
anything up versus arrays, in fact it will probably slow things down.

I suppose you could allocate a chunk of memory, point a variable at a
pointer, and walk the variable through the chunk of memory,
getting/putting the elements of the 'array', but again, this wouldn't
really speed things up, and it's basically what an array does for you.

The only things I have used pointers for in this way was when I had a
few hundred thousand records in a file, and I had to find out which
ones were 'duplicates' (a few fields had to be the same to be
considered 'duplicates'), which involved 100,000^3 read/compare
operations.  I read all records into a user space, and walked a DS
through the user space to speed up the operation.  It worked, but in
the end, somebody on this list came up with a clever LF/chain
scenario, and this was the fastest.

Other than that, if you have a long text field, and you want to show
it on a report or on the screen, and wrap it at different sizes, you
can use pointers.  I have done this, but only to avoid a calculated
number of IF/%SUBST operations.  An overlaid array would have probably
worked just as good, but using pointers is way cooler.


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