Re: Passing Parameters

Hi Don,

Scott, your code was very similar but what I was trying to do was
pass the name of the field and not the actual data in the field ( not
filerec.PLCD but 'filerec.PLCD'

Sorry, your code does NOT pass the name of the field. If you think it does, then you don't even understand what your code does.

What it does is pass the ADDRESS of the field. That's what the %addr() is for, it passes the address of the field. How the heck did you write your code at all if you didn't understand this?

The reason your code works is because the address of the field is within the space in memory occupied by the filerec data structure. So when data is read into filerec, your pointer points to the particular field within the data structure. It has nothing to do with the name of the field, it has to do with it's address -- that is, where it's stored in memory.

Under the covers, in the internals of the machine, my code will look identical to yours. The difference, at the human-level, is that I'm passing a subfield of the data structure directly, whereas you're passing a pointer to a subfield of the data structure, and then dereferencing them. ultimately, we both end up with a 50A field that's in the same area of memory as your file subfield, so they do exactly the same thing.