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On 2012/2/15 1:14 PM, Vern Hamberg wrote:
But I just looked at the V2R1M0 RPG III reference - it mentions an I in
position 18, which is a data-structure-level initialization that behaves
as just described.
The ability to code specific initialization was added to RPG/400 in
V1R3. A blast from the past indeed - I joined IBM near the end of
development for V1R3. I remember feeling quite excited that I got to
participate in (read "listen to") some of the discussions about the
initialization support.
I can wild-guess at a couple of possible reasons that data structures
were originally initialized to blanks, back in the long-long-ago.
(They're initialized by default to blanks now for compatibility.)
1. Early versions of RPG (RPG II) only supported character and zoned
decimal subfields. The value x'40' was interpreted the same as x'F0'
(zero) for zoned decimal, so initializing a DS to x'40's gave blanks for
character and zero for zoned decimal.
2. RPG data structures are also considered to be character fields. So
even if "they" had thought of initializing by subfield when other
subfield types were possible (RPG III on System 38), they might have
decided to continue initializing to blanks anyway, because that's what
RPG programmers were accustomed to.
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