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That's what I was forgetting - reference parameters. Thanks Scott.

Scott Klement wrote:
Hi Peter,

If IBM automatically determines the size of the prefix, and provides a BIF to give us the size of the prefix, you should be able to code your programs so they are future compatible.

How? How could that possibly be? Using an operational descriptor, I could probably reinforce future compatibility with a bit of messing around with pointer logic. But I just don't see how the BIF could possibly solve this problem without requiring an operational descriptor or something like that.

Remember, I'm talking about reference parameters. All that's passed from caller to callee is a pointer. No size, data type, etc is passed. At least with our existing BIFs like %size(), %len(), %decpos(), the BIF doesn't know what the caller's actual size is, it just knows what the local definition is. If the caller's definition doesn't match that, you have problems.


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