Jack, Interesting about the PL/I solution. I don't know anything about the language. However, I just wanted to say that NULL in C is a unique combination of characters. '\0' occupies one cell in a character array, so any single character can occur in a character array in C. Actually there is no data type for strings in C. They are simply arrays of characters.

Perry

----- Original Message ----- From: Jack Hamilton <JackHamilton@firsthealth.com> To: <wattsp@DCA.NET>; <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 1:33 PM Subject: Re: SAS Quote of the week

> "Perry Watts" <wattsp@DCA.NET> wrote: > > >The "odd reason" is that SAS contains no true NULL as a string > delimiter > >that would make a "varchar" possible. The C programming language > does. > > It's not the presence of absence of a NULL character that makes varying > length character variables possible. There are other ways. > > PL/I does it by storing the length of the variable separately. In my > opinion, that's superior to the C convention, because the PL/I approach > allows any character to occur in the string, which the C solution does > not. > -- > JackHamilton@FirstHealth.com > Development Manager, Technical Group > METRICS Department, First Health > West Sacramento, California USA > >