On Thu, 8 Aug 2019 15:08:09 -0400, Tom Conley wrote: > >PRESERVE ON/OFF controls what the editor does with trailing blanks in a >VB record. PRESERVE ON will preserve any REAL trailing blanks (based on >RDW), PRESERVE OFF will truncate any trailing blanks. I'm good with >PRESERVE OFF. Isn't that why God invented VB? > I thought the Devil invented VB.
OK, but how can I append trailing blanks to a record in an existing file, as I can with any good desktop editor, or even a poor one such as Notepad? And with PRESERVE ON, if I insert characters in a line containing trailing blanks it truncates trailing blanks equal to the characters I inserted. PRESERVE ON doesn't "preserve any REAL trailing blanks"; rather, it attempts to preserve the RDW. I wonder what the RFE resulting in PRESERVE asked for? I know neither the history nor the internals, but I suspect that an early predecessor of ISPF Edit supported only RECFM=FB, and when the RFE for VB support appeared, indolent developers chose to pad records to fixed length on input to avoid most changes to existing code, and assume they could repair the damage by stripping trailing blanks on output. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
