This whole COBOL BEFORE/AFTER thing brings up bad memories. But here's the simple rule - one WRITE BEFORE in a program forces the DCB to M. If all the WRITEs have AFTER, it is A.
Now the 20+ year-old war story: One quarter a tape being generated for microfiche was incredibly large, spanning several reels (this was back in 3420 days, and the density had to be 1600 for our vendor). I was asked to find out why. When I looked at the tape, there were two records for every line. This program used AFTERs, but there was one BEFORE in an unexecuted paragraph. It turns out that when you have AFTER in a program that has BEFORE, the AFTER requires 2 output records: one to position the "carriage", and one to write the data with a no-advance as the command code. When I took out the BEFORE, it became A and the output was cut in half. Yay - or so we thought. Turns out our microfiche vendor couldn't handle A, only M. Sigh. Back went the BEFORE. And I added comments explaining why the BEFORE was there. Later, Ray ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
