Ah, perhaps. I was just responding to the "that's great for people who know PL/I, but what about the rest of us?" issue.
What you describe is a little more problematic. I get the problem. Too bad Hollerith did not invent a variable-length punched card. Why not "intelligent" shifting, where 'n' blanks get compressed down to 1 until no more shifting is necessary (or column 71 is reached)? (Or did Peter suggest that?) Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Tom Marchant Sent: Friday, January 24, 2014 9:00 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: System Symbols Question On Fri, 24 Jan 2014 08:25:35 -0800, Charles Mills wrote: >COBOL does this also, right? My COBOL skills are modest to say the >least, but if FOO is PIC X(5) then MOVE 'Now is the time' TO FOO >silently truncates the literal to 'Now i', correct? I understood what Peter wrote differently than this. I thought that he meant that, for example, if a PARMLIB member used a 4 byte symbol, and that symbol had an 8 byte value, the 8 byte value would replace the 4 byte symbol in the record. The remainder of the record would then be shifted right by 4 bytes, and if that was pushed past column 71, that was where the truncation would occur. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
