On Fri, 10 Jan 2014 12:04:48 -0800, Skip Robinson wrote:

>An intriguing question in view of the absence of tabs in the conventional
>EBCDIC character set. 
>
???  Isn't 0x05 TAB in all EBCDIC code pages.

>My emulator (Vista3270) is pretty rich, but even if
>I could somehow type a tab character into an MVS file, what would z/OS do
>with it?
>
>As to your question, I would prefer
>
>   Parm2=FOO<tab>BAR
>
>because any single character representation would mislead the reader into
>typing *that* character. Like the old joke about not finding the "any"
>key.
> 
I once proposed that an editor, such as ISPF, with NULLS ON should
fill all the cells tabbed over with NULs, and a Field Mark (used to be a
key on real 327x) in the final position.  Users could then type over the
nulls, and insert text earlier with much of the WYSIWYG behavior of
other nulls-savvy editors.

A counter argument given was that many emulators fail to implement
the standard behavior of nulls.

-- gil

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