Re: Dynamic Array as return/output parameter in export procedure

Lim Hock-Chai wrote:

In your example, you did an allocation in the caller first. The called
procedure then does the %realloc if needed. I was thinking, since
caller did the allocation first, that might trick the system to think
that the memory is still belongs to the caller after the %realloc in
called procedure. I doubt this is true.

As Scott pointed out, when you use %alloc and %realloc "RPG isn't going to manage it's storage for you!! You have to manage it yourself." As I understand it, the memory is allocated from a "heap" which is scoped to the job.

The reason that allocation is usually done in the caller is that memory management is tricky, and it is usually best that the program that is responsible for allocating memory also take responsibility to deallocate the memory. When you dynamically allocate memory in a procedure in order to return something to the caller, you can't know when it will be okay to deallocate the memory, so this responsibility is passed on to the caller.

I hope that helps clear things up a bit for you,
Adam