RE: Max length of a VARYING field

Barbara,

%addr(x:*data) seems a (much much) more natural way of coding.

To retrieve the address of a varying field, right?
Certainly we still need another way to determine the declared length of a field.
%len() sort of did that for most things, but not for VARYING fields.

So I propose this:

%len(myVarField:*DEFN)

Returns the declared length of the field definition.
Should work for ANY variable and not only VARYING (for consistency sake).


-Bob Cozzi
www.i5PodCast.com
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-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Barbara Morris
Sent: Friday, May 18, 2007 9:18 AM
To: rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Max length of a VARYING field

Scott Klement wrote:

This is different from %addr(). When I do %addr(xx)+2 today, it's my
way of getting the address of the data portion of the VARYING variable.
So %addr(xx:*DATA) makes sense to me in that case.

Heh, we already have %addr(varfld:*DATA) planned for this feature. We
had originally considered having %SIZE(varfld:*something); we couldn't
think of a decent name for the special parameter, which gave us a strong
hint that we were on the wrong track. %addr(x:*data) seems a (much
much) more natural way of coding.

Whereas, something like %len(MyVary: *max) (or your suggestion of
%varysize() which does the same thing) that would give the maximum
amount of CHARACTERS (not bytes) in one fell swoop would be much less ugly.

We hadn't realized until this thread that there was such a need to know
the maximum number of characters a field can hold; %len(string:*MAX) is
how I would do it, for any string type, not just varying, to avoid
having to divide by the character size for ucs2 and dbcs. We'll see ...