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On 2018-02-15 4:44 PM, Jon Paris wrote:
Thanks for the clarification Barbara - how the heck did we ever get to such a complicated set of conditions.


Indeed.

Here's my theory on the origin of the icky rules about whether a field defaults to zoned or packed:

RPG II only supports zoned internal variables. I think "they" wanted to default to packed for RPG III because it was faster, but they kept subfields in data structures as zoned because it allowed the data structure to be viewed as text the way it worked in RPG II.

I don't know whether it would have been better or worse if the default format for an internal field related to a file was the format that was first encountered by the compiler. My guess is that it would have been even worse, since it would change depending on which file was defined first. It would be even more capricious than it is now.


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