Someone else already pointed this out, but it deserves restatement -- if the programmer getting that message has no clue what a "shift-out" or a "shift-in" is, much less the existance of such a thing as a DBCS string, there is little chance she will have any idea what the message means. Ditto for the sysprog she calls for help. DBCS only ever got used to support several asian languages, IIRC, so there is very little chance of having encountered it if you never had to deal with those languages on your mainframe.
And ESPECIALLY when the string in question is NOT one that they coded themselves, but is one produced by the translator, he has even less chance of undestanding the message or what to do about it. I vote with Tom Ross that any message dealing with DBCS and/or NATIONAL (or other little-used features) needs expansion and clarification. Not sure it deserves its own book, an appendix in the COBOL Programmers/Users Guide would be sufficient to cover, I would think. Although true unicode support and internationalization might indeed be a sufficiently daunting subject to need it's own reference book. Peter -----Original Message----- From: Bill Klein [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2005 2:37 PM To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU Subject: Fw: Another OS/390 to z/OS 1.4 migration question (COBOL) With FLAG(I,I) which became the default at the same time as DBCS, the message *does* appear exactly AFTER the line (inserted by the preprocessor) which follows the originally coded line. As the mesage also tells the column where the problem exists, it should be pretty obvious where the problem was. (Again - or at least it would be to me) "Shmuel Metz , Seymour J." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>... > In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on 06/22/2005 > at 07:00 PM, Joe Zitzelberger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > > >And you forgot to terminate or continue in accordance with the rules. > > No, *you* forgot that he was using the preprocessor. The data were not > his in the first place. He simply trusted the IBM preprocessor to > generate correct COBOL code. In context the message is clear as mud. _ This message and any attachments are intended only for the use of the addressee and may contain information that is privileged and confidential. If the reader of the message is not the intended recipient or an authorized representative of the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by e-mail and delete the message and any attachments from your system. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
