Well, various folks have convinced me that I missed this back when I looked for 
it! I have a hazy memory of asking someone-not this list-about it and being 
told "No" but that might be wishful thinking.

 

Hmm, it *had* been a while; I looked at the source, found this comment:
*        Given two COBOL data elements, return an integer

*        containing the difference between them. This is

*        necessary because COBOL does not provide a way to

*        do so, and users need this to calculate offsets

*        between fields in a COBOL copybook
So it's not quite "length of" but surely one could have calculated it using 
lengths. The actual function is, unsurprisingly, quite short: ten lines of 
code, most of it linkage, only four lines of actual "do it" code.

 

Anyway, thanks for all the replies! I do remember feeling kind of disbelieving 
that this wasn't possible using native COBOL.


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