RE: Getting compile error: *RNF5343 30 21 002100 Array hastoomanyomitted indexes; specification is ignored.

[Scott Klement <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yes, Lim... you need to keep a buffer of the screen (you'd have to do this 
if you were writing a 5250 emulator, too.)  no question about that.

But, there's only one screen.  You don't want to keep a separate buffer in 
every subprocedure, that wouldn't make sense.  So it makes absolutely no 
sense for it to be static.

Copying the data from subprocedure to subprocedure would be inefficient, 
to put it mildly.  Instead, you want to have one copy of the data that can 
be referenced by all of the subprocedures.  This would either be done by 
having one "screen object" that you pass as a parameter to every 
subrocedure, or else you'd make it global to the VT100 handling module.

Does a return value return a pointer to a static variable?  No.  It copies 
the entire contents of the variable from the subprocedure to it's caller. 
That's why it's inefficient, and why I wouldn't do things that way.

---
Scott Klement  http://www.scottklement.com



On Fri, 17 Mar 2006, Lim Hock-Chai wrote:

> Some background of what I'm doing:
> 1) I'm trying to write a program to programmatically execute a manual
> option on a paging terminal console screen.
> 2) I'm using Albert's TNAPI program as an example for this.
> 3) Instead of writing a program that do everything, I'm trying to create
> all the VT100 function into a service program.  One of the procedure in
> this service program is to convert the VT100 data stream from the server
> into a regular readable form.  Apparently, VT100 protocol doesn't send
> the entire screen back to the client every time the client requests
> something from the server.  Instead, it only sends what need to overlay
> on the current screen (It could also send esc sequence to clear screen.)
>
> Because of #3, I need the array (VT100 screen) in this procedure to be
> static.  This will allow me to overlay the data from each response that
> client gets back from the server.
>
> Yes, VT100 allow different screen mode.  But because I'm the client, I
> choose 24x80.
>
> The only thing the I'm not sure of on the return value is below:
> 4) If a local variable is declared as static.  What is the effect to use
> that as the return value?  Is return value return the pointer of this
> static variable?  If so, I don't really want that because that means the
> caller can change the value of this static variable.  That is the reason
> that I create a non-static variable and use it to return the data.