Not silly, and in fact necessary. If you're generating a variable length list in which null entries are valid, discarding trailing null arguments would generate erroneous code. Even if you had a convention for explicitly null entries, you'd need a counting loop instead of using the N attribute, making the code longer and less clear.
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List [ASSEMBLER-LIST@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Steve Smith [sasd...@gmail.com] Sent: Sunday, May 29, 2022 2:35 PM To: ASSEMBLER-LIST@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Re: Generating a TR field Well, it's a moot point whether it was a good idea for HLASM to treat a null operand and a non-existent one differently. They can't change it now, without yet another silly option to allow them to act the same way. Regardless, it is a mistake for a macro to bleat out an error because an optional parameter is null. It's trivial to allow null to be equivalent to non-specified. In fact, AIF ('&FOO' EQ '') covers both. It is certainly possible for a macro to be designed to treat non-specified and null both as valid, but with different semantics. Although I doubt that's a good idea. sas > >
