Re: Max length of a VARYING field

[Barbara Morris <bmorris@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Buck wrote:
> ...
> My personal view is basically stylistic.  I've been doing RPG since 1978 
> and my world view is coloured by that.  I don't prefer to see a further 
> exposure of the internal compiler storage regime with 
> options(*varying:4) but that's just s style thing.  I don't have the 
> slightest rational reason for finding that unpleasant to look at and 
> can't justify my position in the slightest.

I agree that it would be nice if the compiler could just handle 
everything, but for reasons both I and Scott have given (interaction 
with other languages, commands, APIs etc), it would be less usable in 
the long run.  Anyway, I think that the internal details of a varying 
length field is similar in difficulty/awkwardness/whatever to the 
internal details of a numeric field (packed/zoned/integer, number of 
digits, number of decimals).  Somewhat difficult to learn at first, but 
once you have learned it, it becomes second nature.

It would be wonderful if there was just a "string" type and a "decimal 
numeric" type, where strings were always varying length but could behave 
like fixed length, and could handle any ccsid; and where numerics could 
handle any decimal value, while also being able to have only 2 decimal 
places.  That's partly available in many interpreted languages.  But RPG 
is a compiled and strongly-typed language; this varying business just 
adds one more icky detail for RPG programmers to deal with.