Re: Interesting quirk about CMD definition

Hello John,

Am 05.04.2022 um 21:14 schrieb John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx>:

So here's a question for folks who can remember or have access to older systems (like V5R2 or even earlier): Has it always been that way?

Yes. This appearance is AFAIR part of the SAA "standard" from IBM, and AFAIR also being written down as a suggestion in the Application Display Programming PDF (see ibmdocs.pocnet.net).

Btw., UIM derived displays do this automatically, while in DDS "manual" displays, I always need to check alignment with SDA. :-)

If your prompt text on a PARM is exactly 30 characters (the maximum allowed), then you DON'T get any dots! Even though there is space for one dot! Why is that?

Again, noted in the SAA: If there is not enough space for at least three dots, they should be omitted.

I did not verify my claims, but they are from my rather fresh memory about the topic.

It seems there is an off-by-one error (or '<' where there should be
'<=') in the code implementing command displays.

Possibly? I didn't take time to dig into command prompting, yet, so I can't tell. Heck, even UIM programming examples seem to be limited to list displays (as an alternative to subfiles). But you could also build automatically formatted "prompt" like displays for your own applications. It's a rather complex topic.

:wq! PoC