I had presumed, silly me, from >I can't find any documentation for SAVE that includes a >second or third operand! that SAVE actually did not document the second and third operands. But it does. So at least that removes the example from the category of using something undocumented.
The behavior is "the length is the number of characters between the first quote and the last quote" and "take the characters between the first quote and last quote, and put that within CL8'...' for each multiple of 8 and an appropriate thing for whatever remains." And yes that means that if your quotes happen to be in "unfortunate positions" things won't work. That's why it works for some SYSPARMs and fails for others. I understand why you don't like that for quotes, I don't like it either. But safety dictates that we leave it unchanged. However the thing that seems to be getting lost here is that the DB2 sample is simply incorrect and should not have the extra quotes. They don't want an extra quote in the generated code any more than you do. Tell them to fix it. And don't accept a simple "no" for an answer. It would probably be nice to accept a FIN. And if they don't choose to change the sample, then they must document the restrictions on the lengths of SYSPARMs that "work" (such documentation would be pretty silly and take longer to figure out than changing the sample). I suspect they'll be pretty happy to fix the sample in a future release. Sure, we could provide a new and improved SAVEX macro (or more simply a new option on the existing SAVE macro). But I would guess that in practice there is no one who has a need for such a construct. And no one who would use it. Certainly DB2 doesn't need it. And almost no one even knows of the existence of the option. So submit a requirement that makes a valid business case and I'll be glad to give you a 4th operand on SAVE (or a keyword) that does things the way you would expect. But don't ask us to do work to create something that no one will use. It appears that no one vocal enough to ask has needed the function in the lifetime of the SAVE macro. Needs can certainly change. But have they, in this case? Peter Relson z/OS Core Technology Design ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
