Re: Sorting arrays

[Barbara Morris <bmorris@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Rory Hewitt wrote:
> As you can see, I didn't use the same-named fields that Booth used, because
> I basically cut 'n' pasted my own code in there.
>
> If you wanted, you could hold the buffer positions of the various fields in
> the DS in a compile-time array and then simply use memcmp() or memicmp() in
> sortproc. That would *greatly* simplify the code in sortproc()...

I wouldn't use memcmp or memicmp for comparing data structure subfields. 
 It only works for fixed-length character, unsigned integer, *ISO dates 
and timestamps.  For every other data type, doing a memory compare gives 
incorrect results.

For example, with zoned subfields, -456 (x'F4F5D6') compares greater 
than zoned 123 (x'F1F2F3').  Varying length 'abc' (x'0003818283') 
compares greater than 'b' (x'000182').  Varying length 'a' might not 
compare equal to 'a', depending on what junk followed the current data 
in each field.