If your routine is to be used heavily there is a much faster way to do left justifications. It is to use a TRTE with a 256-byte table that defines only a blank, x'40', as a licit character. This approach yields the zero-origin offset of the leftmost non-blank directly.
If I were writing such a routine, as I did long ago, I would also give it an additional entry point for right justification, which can [now] be accomplished using the same approach [and the same table] but using a TRTRE instead of a TRTE. I agree 'philosophically' with most of what Bill wrote; but single-character-by-single-character operations on strings are, I think, not just tedious but ugly where better approaches are available. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA
