Ingres 6.4 4GL programs are insensitive to length and type errors when returning BYREF values to a calling program. Ingres is more sensitive to return values that are too long or the wrong type. In some cases, this can result in programs aborting and segmentation violations. The cure is to ensure that the called and calling routines return values of compatible length and type.

An as interim fix, an environment variable can be set to cause the 4GL runtime system to pass parameters the way 6.4 did: all integers forced to 4-byte, all floats forced to 8-byte. Character string passing is not affected. The environment variable setting is: