RE: Multi Occurrence Data Structure returned from a procedure

>> It's nice to have some of the lower level things available, but they're not 
>> necessary to do a lot of
>> the things I do.  It's helpful to understand them so you can make 
>> intelligent decisions about when and when not >> to use them. Sometimes you 
>> really do need them.

For most normal programming, I don't need them but to implement service 
programs, I find it pretty hard not to use them in some form. Not to return to 
caller but for some form of dynamic memory management. Nice thing about objects 
is that it manages all of this for you but when building service programs, we 
don't have that luxury. 

Nice thing is that pointers in ILR/RPG is that they are implemented very 
cleanly. Doing pointers in "C" is real interesting and when get those pointers 
to pointers to pointers structures all in one statement, those are real fun but 
playing with pointers in "C" helped me understand pointers in general and in 
ILE/RPG. 

The important thing for me is to hide away my use of pointers as best I can 
inside service programs so that the average user doesn't need to use them or 
understand them. Just call the function and get results.