John Ehrman has made the crucial point. Character terms are problematic My personal preference, predictably, is to use the facilities of the macro language. Once a character set symbol has been defined all of that language's facilities for concatenation, substring construction, and character counting are available in open code for it.
Thus, |&text setc 'very long string' |&tk seta k'&text | DC CL&tk'&text' Or again, |&prefix setc 'Lincoln''s' |&infix setc ' Doctor''s' &suffix setc ' Dog' |&text setc '&prefix'.'&infix'.'&suffix' |&tk seta k'&text DC CL&tk'&text' Or yet again, &plural setc 'children' &singular setc '&plural'(1,5) On Mon, May 4, 2015 at 2:49 PM, John Ehrman <ehr...@us.ibm.com> wrote: > Much of this discussion seems to illustrate a risk in using character > literals: it's difficult to refer explicitly to their length attribute. > One could write > > MVC Target(L'=C'very long string'),=C'very long string') > > hoping you made the two instances identical. It seems preferable to me to > define the literal as a character constant: > > LS DC C'very long string' > > and then use its length attribute: > > MVC Target(L'LS),LS > > John Ehrman > -- John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA