How about not making this about padding. My guess would be that cobol clears the storage before the read instead of padding storage after the read. I would telling the programmer:
Before a READ INTO, the storage is cleared with nulls. The size of the area to be cleared is set by his program in the 01 section (not by the program that called his program). Jon Perryman. ----- Original Message ----- > From: John McKown <john.archie.mck...@gmail.com> > > The problem is how do I describe this to a COBOL programmer who just > doesn't "get it". He expects COBOL to _not_ pad the "non > existent" > occurrences with blanks. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
