"Anderson, Michael" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>I was troubled with this same problem for at least two hours until I
>finally figured out that I needed to put the "&" ampersand in front of
>the parameters in question. I'm not sure what the ampersand does for the
>"C" compiler, I know it doesn't correspond to the USING and GIVING in
>COBOL, it's closer to the BY REFERENCE or BY VALUE. Any further
>explanations will be humbly accepted.

The ampersand tells C that you want the address of the variable.  In COBOL
all the variables are passed by reference anyway, so no ampersand is
needed.  HP has a special format using "\"s to indicate that you are
passing a variable by value (only used, of course, when calling a system
intrinsic or non-COBOL program).  The compiler knows whether a variable has
to be passed by value or by reference if you use "CALL INTRINSIC", so you
can usually just miss out the "\"s.  C is much less forgiving, but allows
you to do things that would be very difficult to do in COBOL.  Yer pays yer
money and yer takes yer choice.

John D. Alleyn-Day
Alleyn-Day International
408-286-6421   408-286-6474 (Fax)
[log in to unmask]       http://www.Alleyn-Day.com