Tom Marchant wrote <begin extract> Indeed, when I started as an application programmer in 1970, that was the standard that my code was expected to follow. </end extract>
and that is what I have always recommended and, on occasion, embodied in programming standards. This notion is also embedded in the PL/I convention, as in | appprog: procedure(parm) options(main) reorder ; | | declare parm character(*) varying ; | . . . | declare parml signed binary fixed(15,0), length builtin ; | . . . | parml = length(parm) ; | . . . | | end appprog ; in which parm, like all strings declared to be varying, is here a character string prefixed by a current-length signed-halfword value, 0 <= L <= 32767. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
