Stored procedures may begin with the Compile statement which serves to

• identify the stored procedure as a function or subroutine;

• identify the stored procedure’s name;

• declare the arguments passed to the stored procedure, providing the argument names and data types.

An example of a Compile statement is:

Compile Function COUNT_INVOICES(Integer inv_count)

Argument names have the same rules as stored procedure names. You may pass in as many as 256 arguments. Rules for stored procedure and argument names are as follows:

• begin with an alpha character;

• do not use spaces or periods;

• limit names to 50 characters or less.