Re: Max length of a VARYING field

Buck wrote:

...
My personal view is basically stylistic. I've been doing RPG since 1978 and my world view is coloured by that. I don't prefer to see a further exposure of the internal compiler storage regime with options(*varying:4) but that's just s style thing. I don't have the slightest rational reason for finding that unpleasant to look at and can't justify my position in the slightest.

I agree that it would be nice if the compiler could just handle everything, but for reasons both I and Scott have given (interaction with other languages, commands, APIs etc), it would be less usable in the long run. Anyway, I think that the internal details of a varying length field is similar in difficulty/awkwardness/whatever to the internal details of a numeric field (packed/zoned/integer, number of digits, number of decimals). Somewhat difficult to learn at first, but once you have learned it, it becomes second nature.

It would be wonderful if there was just a "string" type and a "decimal numeric" type, where strings were always varying length but could behave like fixed length, and could handle any ccsid; and where numerics could handle any decimal value, while also being able to have only 2 decimal places. That's partly available in many interpreted languages. But RPG is a compiled and strongly-typed language; this varying business just adds one more icky detail for RPG programmers to deal with.