On Sat, 3 Jan 2026 08:41:06 +0000, Farley, Peter wrote: > >“Alphanumeric” is not too restrictive; AFAIK that term has always included ALL >binary character values, not just alphabetic and numeric, so all punctuation >and even “control” values (less than the value of a SPACE character) are >allowed. > IBM contradicts itself. I'm familiar with: <https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/hla-and-tf/1.6.0?topic=set-standard-character> The term alphanumeric characters includes both alphabetic characters and digits, but not special characters.
But you: <https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cobol-zos/6.5.0?topic=literals-basic-alphanumeric> Basic alphanumeric literals can contain any character in a single-byte EBCDIC character set. I'll submit a Feedback: "Please, IBM, get your act together." -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
