Re: Pointer Error

Paul wrote:
This solved the problem and
reinforces my belief that we should avoid passing pointers when other
more safe techniques exist.I hope this is not too crude a solution as do
admit that I do find this area quite difficult to follow and as such am
a bit worried how I'll get on with Java as we are dropping RPG in favor
of OO.

Paul, switching from RPG to Java will make things much easier in respect of Pointers and memory allocation. An error as the described is impossible to reproduce in Java. The runtime, the compiler and the programming environment are doing much more work for the programmer to protect the application from such errors.
- every pointer knows, what it's pointing to
- parameter passing is type safe
- error handling is forced
- memory deallocation is by automatic

The main problem on the road from rpg to java is to forget most of programming technics, you have used in RPG and using easier (and thus better) technics to write more powerfull applications. It's the design of applications, not the language, OO versus procedural is the question.

Dieter