Re: Parsing CL comments

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Dennis Lovelady <iseries@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Simon Coulter wrote:

I thought I had tried this same form yesterday hence the third example
in my previous append but after seeing Charles' earlier response I
tried again and it failed with a syntax error. Your example above also
fails.

CPD0011 Qualifier missing from qualified name 'MYOBJ*    '.
CPF0001 Error found on *N command.

The first /* must have either a leading or trailing space to be
considered a start of comment flag. Since a space starts a new token
and a space is not valid in a parameter value (unless quoted) then a
parser can "know" that a comment is not allowed at that point and
therefore interprets the /* as the start of a qualified name. Note
that when examining the above message the complaint is about missing
data after the closing slash which indicates that parser has accepted
the /*Shows as a valid qualifier for the first MYOBJ and has accepted
each of the remaining words as valid tokens. Thus this error must
occur very early in the parsing sequence before validation of the
tokens themselves occurs.

I'm inclined to agree in spite of the documentation "opportunity" at IBM.

The documentation says exactly what Simon did. My prior post quoted
from the manual:

"Comments can be inserted either inside or outside a command’s
character string wherever a blank is permitted. However, because a
continuation character must be the last non-blank character of a line
(or record), comments may not follow a continuation character on the
same line."

"Comments can include any of the 256 EBCDIC characters. However, the
character combination */ should not appear within a comment because
these characters end the comment. To begin a comment, the characters
/* must be placed in the first position of the command, be preceded by
a blank, or be followed by either a blank or an asterisk."

Re-read the last sentence above.

Note that the two paragraphs above don't come one after the other in
the manual, there's a bit of other info between them.

Charles