That's a definite maybe. You can certainly have a null in a quoted DSN, but you can't catalog it, which makes it pretty useless. I can see nulls in path names creating all sorts of havoc in a Eunix environment, but it's not my dog.
PL/I allows the three national characters #, $ and @ in identifiers, but I believe that ANSI removed them in the standard. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf of Paul Gilmartin [[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2023 2:09 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: "National" characters On Tue, 11 Jul 2023 13:48:31 -0400, Matt Hogstrom wrote: >I think “Special" is a more accurate term today. For instance, I’ve used them >to force some members to the top of a list based on sort order. > Classic MacOS allowed NUL in filenames and some authors employed it for that purpose, especially to control order of loading extensions. It should work similarly in z/OS. An Industry Standard should govern COBOL nomenclature; otherwise IBM should consistently follow its own rules. Does PL/I straddle that boundary? -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
