RE: Max length of a VARYING field

From: Steve Richter

how does it go? mascara on a donkey? the problem with using varying
to build and XML stream is varying fields cannot be extended in size.
You declare a varying(4) to be max 1000000 characters, but your
general purpose RPG procedure that builds an XML stream from a
database might exceed that size. Java strings dont have this
restriction. Would be great if an RPG procedure could new up a Java
StringBuilder object and then append characters to it. Is that doable
now?

Actually, Java Strings have far more restrictions than RPG VARYING fields.
Strings are in fact immutable.

You're thinking of the StringBuffer class, which allows appends but has
horrible performance for most string operations.

As to requiring your programming languages to have no limits on anything
(field size, number of digits, decimal precision, object size, whatever),
that just means you didn't know what you're programming. In that case, use
an interpreted language like the script kiddies do. That way you don't
actually have to think about things ahead of time! You can just "refactor"
it in! Whoo hoo!

Joe