Re: Code and CL

["Simon Coulter" <shc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Mark,

You wrote:
>2) The logical not character (SHIFT-6) shows up as a carat. This character
>is transferred to the source PF as a carat. I can't even get that character
>in a 5250 screen using SEU.

You should ALWAYS use the symbolic values (i.e., *NOT, *CAT, *BCAT, *TCAT)
and NEVER use the caret ^, vertical bar | and angle brackets <>.  The ^|<>
characters are variant which means their representation in hex is not the
same in different codepages.  Since CCSID encoding is intended to maintain
the visual representation of the character an ASCII caret is converted to an
EBCDIC caret during transfer to the Host.  The problem is that the EBCDIC
caret is not the same hex value as an EBCDIC not symbol.  Thus the compile
fails.

This is not only a problem between PC and Host but since CL is partially
interpreted using the ^ || >| <| symbols can cause execution failures if
your CL code runs on an AS/400 with a different primary language.

Besides *NOT, *CAT, *BCAT, and *TCAT are FAR more obvious in intent and self
documenting.

There is more to this problem regarding the fact that the caret is not a not
symbol, it just happens to occupy the same keyboard location, so different
keyboard mappings will cause different effects.  However, I've made my point
-- don't use the variant characters!

Regards,
Simon Coulter.

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