>Shmuel is correct.

No, he's not.

My point was that with REXX you *can* do a substr(source,8,5) with a
source shorter than 13 bytes and REXX will pad the 3 characters from the
source with two blanks and *will assign* a 5 character string to the
target (varchar) variable.

So,with REXX the statement  X = substr("1234567890", 8, 5) will assign
the string "890  " (2 trailing blanks) to variable X.
With PL/I, you get the compiler message I posted. 

NOTE that I did not say PL/I is wrong. I (indirectly) said Shmuel's
statement was wrong.

I originally mentioned the REXX behavior and said that none of the other
programming languages I know offers the same functionality.  It was in a
reply to this statement where Shmuel sparsely replied: PL/I

--
Peter Hunkeler

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