Whitehead famously defined a Unitarian as "someone who believes in, at most, one God".
The analogous principle here is that a COBOL batch main program may have at most one parameter, a PARM, a value of which may be omitted from, for example, a JCL EXEC statement, in which case its value will be a nul string if it is declared in this COBOL program. If instead the COBOL program has not declared a PARM any value supplied will be invisible to that COBOL program. I strongly suspect, however, that Mr. Raupach's real interest is in the general case in which some COBOL program calls another employing a CALL statement and a USING list. COBOL does support functions---although this facility is not, as I remember, much used at the Hartford. When a function is used the single value it returns counts as an additional parameter and appears in the parameter list. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
