"In reality, only the first byte of the BB is actually used. Why waste a byte?"
John... Maybe IBM wasted a byte to keep the rest of the record at least halfword aligned, assuming that the record was read into a halfword aligned address (fullword usually was the case). On the old boxes, there was a performance penalty using halfword instructions (LH, STH, AH, SH) on a field that was not halfword aligned. In the old days, I would always design my records so that the halfword and fullword fields fell on the proper boundary. Or maybe the extra byte was "reserved for future use". Ed... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
