RE: Max length of a VARYING field

From: Barbara Morris

Thanks for your thoughts on this, Scott. We have thought about
VARYING4, but we would want to allow the explicit VARYING2 as well, and
we think that it's more clear that VARYING and VARYING(2) are equivalent
than that VARYING and VARYING2 are equivalent. The concept of a default
parameter is common in RPG, but VARYING2 looks like it means something
different from VARYING.

Ultimately, people have to know what the syntax means anyway, but I
agree that it's ideal if someone reading the code can guess right about
what it means.

Okay, how about something straightforward:

VARYING(*MAX32KB)
VARYING(*MAX2GB)
VARYING(*MAX128TB)

The numbers are based on 2, 4 and 6 byte prefixes, but with one bit unused
(not sure why one bit is unused, except that 32KB is the current maximum, so
I kept the pattern going).

Let VARYING default to VARYING(*MAX32KB) and all is well.

I stopped at 48-bit addressing (technically 47-bit) because it's just hard
for me to conceive of a situation where one would need more than 128
terabytes for a single field. If you decided to go to 63 bits, I guess you
do *MAX8EB (eight exabytes).

Joe