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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