"Steve Comstock" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>... <snip> > And I can't figure out why they made that change, > since DBCS is, supposedly, on its eventual way > out, to be replaced by NATIONAL (Unicode). Any > idea why the default was changed? Especially since > the vast majority of US shops do not even use > DBCS data? >
NSYMBOL(National) *requires* (forces on) DBCS, so actually having/allowing the DBCS option is a "pre-requisite" for having Unicode support. There are some long and "painful" internal discussions (between myself and the IBM ANSI COBOL rep) and within the J4 group about exactly what is "Standard conforming" behavior when you have "control characters" within an alphanumeric literal. I won't go into them here, but I semi-understand the IBM position that ALLOWING "national" character strings within an alphanumeric literal is a "good thing" when you MAY use X"0E" type notation *if* you want to have those x'0d' and x'0e' within literals. The change in defaults WAS highlighted in announcements, migration guides, and installation material - but what its IMPLICATIONS were - are probably unclear to most programmers (application or systems). As stated in another note, if you use the COBOL3 CICS translator option, you will never have a problem with this (for CICS generated code) and the amount of "user code" with hex 0E and 0D "intentionally" within NON-DBCS alphanumeric literals is so small that I suspect this should not be a major problem. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
