On Wed, May 03, 2017 at 02:21:02AM -0400, Rob van der Heij wrote: > > For the record and for the curious plumbers; the problem that I have with > it is that a separator at the end of the record is optionally removed, > which causes surprises for fields relative to the end (e.g. af -1). > There may have been too much water through the pipe to fix that now. > UNIX utilities struggle with such behavior. For some: o If the delimiter is a blank: - Multiple blanks are equivalent to a single blank. - A trailing blank is ignored. o If the delimiter is (e.g.) a comma, multiple delimiters and trailing delimiters indicate empty fields.
Rexx's CALL instruction provides no way to indicate a null last argument. In HLASM, using a comma to separate the comment field can indicate two null arguments to a macro. -- gil