There has been an ongoing discussion on comp.lang.fortran on the initialization of variables, including questions about OS/360 and its compilers.
As I understand it, Fortran variables, and DS in assembler, generate holes in the object program (no TXT record for that position), and are filled in either by the linkage editor or program fetch. I believe that early OS/360 versions left whatever happened to be there, either in the linkage editor buffer or, for program fetch, in that memory location. At some time later, possibly for security reasons, this was changed to initialize to zero, or maybe something else (such as X'81'). The actual question is: when was this change made and which programs (compilers, linkage editors, program fetch) were changed? -- glen ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
