<pointer-valued attribute>

The string of characters that forms the value of the pointer-valued attribute is copied to the location indicated by the stack-destination-pointer. The string of characters is formatted in the destination array row in a form suitable to serve in a replace pointer-valued attribute statement that assigns a value to the same attribute. The character string ends with an EBCDIC period (8".").

For example, if P is a pointer identifier and F1 and F2 are file identifiers, then the following sequence of statements is valid:

REPLACE P BY F1.TITLE;
REPLACE F2.TITLE BY P;

All pointer-valued attributes have a character size of eight bits. At run time, if the destination pointer does not also have a character size of eight bits, the program is discontinued with a fault.

If a pointer-valued attribute appears as the source part in a REPLACE statement, a call is made on an operating system procedure to perform this part of the REPLACE statement.

<string expression>

When a string expression appears as the source part in a REPLACE statement, it is evaluated and stored in a pool array. The stack-source-pointer is initialized to point to the first character of the string in the pool array. The entire string is copied to the destination.

Example of a String Expression

The following example copies the EBCDIC string ABCDEFG to the location pointed to by P.

STR:= "ABCDEFG";
REPLACE P BY STR;