Date issue

I have been trying to port some code from a V5R2 to V5R1 machine and am 
running into some problems with a few date fields.

In the DDS for the display file I have a date field set as follows:

I defined it as an output field 10 characters in length and then changed the 
DDS to the following:

ddate L datfmt(*usa)

The DDS compiled fine, in the RPG code I have an eval statement that is 
supposed to assign the system date to the ddate field as follows:

eval ddate = %date

However it keeps saying that the two are not the same type, is there 
something else I need to do with the %date function in order to make it usa 
standard?

Douglas