At 03:32 PM 4/6/00 -0400, Doug Chamberlin wrote:

>
>I have often wanted to work on your item #1 (creating a library of UDF's
>which provide similar functions to Oracle functions). One big impediment is
>that a UDF cannot now tell if a field whose value is being passed into the
>function is NULL. Nor can a UDF return a NULL state as a result. I would
>like to see this changed so that both are provided in a future version of
>IB. Perhaps a new parameter passing convention similar to VMS descriptors?
>

Actually Interbase has had a parameter passing convention modelled
on VMS descriptors from the very beginning of UDFs (version 2?).
The probably is that languages other than C are incapable of handling
them. And, unlike VMS descriptors, Interbase descriptors carry
a null flag. Also, if I remember correctly, a descriptor could be
used to return a value.

Jim Starkey