On Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:51:11 -0700, Steve Comstock wrote: > >If you omit the BLOCK CONTAINS clause, the default is >BLOCK CONTAINS 1 RECORDS. (talk about not making semantic >sense). > It isn't even syntactically correct.
But the original COBOL designers were pessimists. They never imagined that IBM would ever DTRT and supply a system default blocking factor. So, the default was 1, meaningful only diachronically, not 0 which is practical synchronically. >A few years ago, changes were made so that for an existing >file OPEN will have the blocksize in the data set label >override the block contains value in the program, even if >the block contains is not zero. (For COBOL only, near as >I can tell.) > Obviously, the change is in the COBOL RTL, not in the access method. Once again, IBM designers DTRT but in the wrong layer. This should have been fixed in the access method so it would benefit all applications, not in the COBOL RTL where it benefits only COBOL. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
