Re: CL parameters over 32 length

[Vernon Hamberg <vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Erwin

You ask why it used to work and now it doesn't, all of a sudden. And 
that nothing has changed.

I suggest that you have been lucky. Probably what has been in memory has 
been blanks. That is never guaranteed but can happen. An upgrade of the 
OS could change alignment of parameters, maybe resulting in this change 
for you. Or whatever happens in memory now.

You did not say how you have been calling the program - are you using 
QCMDEXC or SMBJOB? Both of those behave as others have described doing 
the call from a command line.

I do want to gently challenge your calling this a "problem"- it is long 
documented - I'd say since 1980 or so, when System 38 came out (1978?). 
This is a strongly-typed system as parameter definitions go - and that 
typing includes size. We don't have the kind of parameter passing that 
appends a null automatically, so one has to ask, what length would be 
good as a default when the size is not known? This is similar to the 
default for numeric values (packed 15,5) - that's definitely not what I 
want when my parameter is packed 5,3 - but what other default 
declaration would work better? No matter the choice, something will not 
match.

Been there, done that, no T-shirt for this one, man!

Cheers
Vern

On 7/5/2018 2:58 AM, Erwin Donker wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We have a CL program that uses 3 input parameters. The first parameter is *CHAR length 50, the second parameter is *CHAR length 44 and the third parameter is *CHAR length 512.
>
> When this CL program is called with values that are smaller than the parameter length (for instance 23 characters for the first parameter), we have noticed that the value of the second parameter gets added tot he first, starting at position 33.
>
> I have searched the internet and have found that this behaviour is intentional. From what I understand, *CHAR parameters are padded with blanks up to 32 characters. Whatever was in memory after position 32 becomes part of the value of the first parameter.
>
> I have also found several suggestions as workaround fort his issue, som y question is nota bout how I can solve this problem. What I really don't understand is why this CL program has worked for months without any problems and then suddenly starts showing this behaviour. The program has not been changed, the calling program has not been changed. We did apply PTF's but this was 1 week before the CL program started showing this behaviour so I don't think the PTF's are causing this. So basically what I want to know is, why does using CL parameters over 32 characters sometimes work, and sometimes not?
>
> Another question out of curiosity, this "problem" has been around at least since 1998 and probably much longer (1998 was the oldest information I found online). I see many people having issues with this, so why has IBM never changed this?
>
> Erwin Donker
>
>
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