Actually, you can, and always could, call a program with a longer variable length parameter. You just had to allocate the desired buffer size 1-32760 (plus the length field), and fill in the data and the length and call with the pointer to it.
When you called the program from JCL, the JCL interpreter would create a buffer of 100 bytes, plop in your PARM='value', and set the length field. With this change, when the JCL interpreter sees the PARMDD=, it allocates the buffer of 32768 bytes and plops in the data from PARMDD= and fills in the length field. If (the length is over 100 and / or the PARMDD was used) *AND* the program is in an APF library *AND* the program does NOT have the LONGPARM attribute, it will ABEND. Non-APF programs will run, and APF programs with the LONGPARM attribute will run. -- Mike A Schwab, Springfield IL USA Where do Forest Rangers go to get away from it all? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
