Re: Max length of a VARYING field

[Barbara Morris <bmorris@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Scott Klement wrote:
> This is different from %addr().   When I do %addr(xx)+2 today, it's my 
> way of getting the address of the data portion of the VARYING variable. 
>   So %addr(xx:*DATA) makes sense to me in that case.

Heh, we already have %addr(varfld:*DATA) planned for this feature.  We 
had originally considered having %SIZE(varfld:*something); we couldn't 
think of a decent name for the special parameter, which gave us a strong 
hint that we were on the wrong track.  %addr(x:*data) seems a (much 
much) more natural way of coding.

> Whereas, something like   %len(MyVary: *max) (or your suggestion of 
> %varysize() which does the same thing) that would give the maximum 
> amount of CHARACTERS (not bytes) in one fell swoop would be much less ugly.

We hadn't realized until this thread that there was such a need to know 
the maximum number of characters a field can hold; %len(string:*MAX) is 
how I would do it, for any string type, not just varying, to avoid 
having to divide by the character size for ucs2 and dbcs.  We'll see ...