On Mon, 23 May 2005 23:41:16 -0500, Bill Klein wrote: >The most current COBOL documentation on this is actually in the LE manual. >See: > http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/ceea2150/2.1.4 >which has (in the sample COBOL code): >03 PARM-BYTE PIC X OCCURS 0 TO 100 DEPENDING ON STRINGLEN. >STRINGLEN is defined as: > STRINGLEN PIC 9(4) USAGE IS BINARY. > >but I *believe* that older manuals had this as a SIGNED field. > Yes. From the dusty "IBM OS Full American National Standard COBOL, GC28-6396-5, Revised 12/1/75 by TNL GN26-0808, p. 234": ... At execution time, the USING option may be used to pass parameters from the EXEC job control statement to a main COBOL program. In this case, a USING option on the Procedure Division header of a main program may contain identifier-1 as its only operand. Information from the PARM field of the EXEC statement is then available in the Linkage Section at the location specified as identifier-1. The first two bytes of identifier-1 contain a count of the number of bytes of information in the PARM field; the two bytes are set to zero if the PARM field was omitted. This two-byte field is binary and should be defined with PIC S9(4) COMP. Immediately following these two bytes is the information in the PARM field. The maximum length of the field to be passed is 100 bytes. ...
Norbert Friemel ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
