RE: Max length of a VARYING field

[Vernon Hamberg <vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joe

The current 32K limit might be cuz they are treating the number as signed.

Vern

At 10:25 AM 5/12/2007, you wrote:

> > 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