Re: Use of VARYING fields

David FOXWELL wrote:

Hi,

I was asked why use this kind of variable. A part from tidying up the code when concatenating text fields, I wasn't sure. The problem is that our data dictionary is used in all our RPG sources and all zones are supposed to be declared like a field in the dictionary.

Are there other advantages?

Thanks

They're very much like strings in most other languages, where char
fields are more like an array of char. Varying variables make string
manipulation (concatenation, character substitution, passing arbitrary
length values, program defined output buffering, empty strings, etc)
much easier. Try writing a parser, or managing a delimited data
structure with fixed length strings. You'll see the advantage.