I've never understood why the exec parm needs to be copied somewhere by the receiving program, except for printing in which case you probably need to check the length anyway. I don't feel like groveling through my source libs right now, but I'd be surprised if any of my programs, going back to the 1970s, would break with long parms.
Two obvious reasons for moving the PARM to a data field are conversion to upper case (which could be done for the EXEC PARM in situ), and to have a known terminator character (e.g., X'00') that would make it easier to use TRT relying on an ending character without also repeatedly checking the length. And obviously any good programmer would check the input length.
Gerhard Postpischil
Bradford, VT
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