<snip> PL/X, on the average, is not really better than C in terms of what you describe except when the string's length is known in advance (which is hard or impossible in many circumstances </snip>
I didn't see stated in any post on this topic the explicit mention of zero-delimited strings. That is what the discussion seems to be talking about. Not all "character areas" are zero-delimited. PL/X has no support for a zero-delimited string. When z/OS interfaces are used within C, there are rarely (if ever) zero-delimited strings. A C program could/would use MEMCPY to copy a string for which the length is known. And there are analogs of that for "compare". That makes it a less natural language construct within C than a zero-delimited string. PL/X does have the concept of a variable-length string (with the length being in a separate variable, or in a preceding halfword). Manipulation of a variable-length string is going to be very different than manipulation of a zero-delimited string. Peter Relson z/OS Core Technology Design ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
