Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!wuarchive!wugate!uunet!mcvax!sunic!enea!sommar From: sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: VAR vs. IN/OUT Message-ID: <181@enea.se> Date: 13 Aug 89 21:14:55 GMT Organization: Enea Data AB, Sweden Lines: 22 Richard Pattis (pattis@june.cs.washington.edu) writes: > The equivalent of Pascal's non-VAR mode (which is rarely needed) can be Depends on what you mean. For efficiency VAR gives better result, but VAR/non-VAR is the only way to distinguish between IN parameters on the one hand and OUT and IN OUT parameters. Good programming style is to only use VAR for the latter two cases. Only when efficency is a problem IN parameters should be passed with the VAR mechanism. (Or if you like me is using VAX-Pascal and CDD. (Commin Data Dictionary) When you declare a quadword field in the CDD, this is expanded in Pascal to an empty record with the size attribute of 8 bytes. This type must always be a VAR parameter. As a vaule parameter, this always results in a zero being passed. Have you ever such a stupid !"#$%&/() behaviour?) But, of course, as well already have noted, this bitching with passing mechanism isn't something the programmer should be burdend with (and least of all a beginner). He should only be concerned about the semantical meaning: IN, OUT or IN OUT. -- Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar@enea.se "Hey poor, you don't have to be Jesus!" - Front 242