Redimensioning structures? Why?

[Edja]

I was checking the manual to better understand how to work with structures. Under keyword "DIM" I've read

you can repeat a structure declaration so long as the format is identical to that specified when it was first declared. In this case the contents of the structure remain unchanged: they are not initialised.

Why would I ever redimension a structure if this doesn' t change anything ? A programming technique I'm not familiar with perhaps ?
Edja

[RichardRussell]

Why would I ever redimension a structure if this doesn' t change anything ?

The most likely reason is a PRIVATE structure. Consider this procedure:

Code: Select all

      DEF PROCtest
      PRIVATE struct{}
      DIM struct{member1, member2}
      struct.member1 += 1
      PRINT struct.member1
      ENDPROC

Since the structure is declared as PRIVATE its contents must remain unchanged from one call of the procedure to the next, that's the definition of PRIVATE. But necessarily the structure is declared within the procedure, since that defines its scope, so if the declaration were to initialise the contents of the structure the PRIVATE would be ineffective. You would end up with it behaving like a LOCAL structure instead.

There are other situations in which applying the principles of Information Hiding or Encapsulation you might find it desirable to declare even a global structure multiple times rather than just once, to hide its declaration from view. The dlglib library does that a lot, I think.

[Edja]

OK, understood. Thank you!
I'll have a look too at the dlglib code

Edja