Re: RPGV?

["M. Lazarus" <mlazarus@xxxxxxxx>]

Scott,

 I think that Dennis was referring to "overloading" the result 
(return value) of the BIF, but the point is just as valid.

 -mark

At 1/11/10 01:19 PM, you wrote:
> Hi Dennis,
>
> > I suspect that the rules that govern the operation of BIF are closely
> > tied to the rules that limit our procedures' abilities.
>
> There are existing precedents of BIFs working in an overloaded fashion.
>
> For example, the %DEC() BIF can take a Unicode, Alphanumeric, Date, Time
> or Timestamp field as it's first parameter.  Indeed, the 2nd parameter
> is different for a D/T/Z field than it would be if it were a character
> string.
>
> The same is true of the %date(), %char(), %int(), etc, etc BIFs... they
> all can take their input from just about any data type.  Something we
> can't really do with subprocedures.