[Info-vax] calloc fails with access violation

[Richard Maher]

"John Reagan" <johnrreagan at earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:266dnSnvNdUVgA7XnZ2dnUVZ_v-dnZ2d at earthlink.com...
>
> <VAXman- @SendSpamHere.ORG> wrote in message
> news:00A90863.E6048EBC at SendSpamHere.ORG...
> > In article
> > <7447c5b2-7ae5-488d-a2a8-099088796bd2 at r42g2000yqj.googlegroups.com>,
Jose
> > Cuevas
> >
> > COBOL does not, AFAIK, create NULL terminated strings when passing data
by
> > reference.  In fact, I have written many Macro32 routines for people
using
> > COBOL and I've not seen a null terminated string.  You might see data
with
> > a null but that is NOT guaranteed.  John Reagan, compiler droogie, may
be
> > lurking and can better address this.
> >
>
> No, I don't think it does.  However, Hein or Richard will certainly be
able
> to offer real examples.  They've forgotten more about COBOL than I know
[but
> then again, I haven't tried very hard to learn COBOL :) ]
>

"Null-terminated Strings" God help us :-(

I'm not sure what the OP intended but COBOLs string passing by default is
just a reference to a chunk of memory of an agreed maximum size. By
Descriptor can be useful (more so for languages like BASIC than C I guess)
but if you want to null-terminate then just: -

01  my_asciz.
     03 some_max             pic x(15).
     03                              pic x(1) value low-value.

or there's: -

01  my_varchar.
      03  strlen                   pic 9(4) comp.
     03  some_max           pic x(15).

or :-

call "str$trim" using by descriptor some_max, some_max
                              by reference true_len
                     giving sys_status.
call "c_rubbish" using by descriptor some_max(1:true_len).

> John

Cheers Richard Maher
>
>

PS. is calloc "cancel alloc" or "character alloc"? Not sure what you'd be
cancelling/freeing but at the end of the day COBOL just gives you a pointer
to a chunck of memory whose format size and content you have to have some
convention for. It's as straight forward as it gets and very little in the
way of Stack,