Re: [open-cobol-list] invalid VALUE clause

[Keisuke Nishida]

At Tue, 10 Feb 2004 16:15:29 -0600,
William M. Klein wrote:
> 
> Using Z's makes a numeric field a numeric-edited field, not an alphanumeric
> or alphanumeric-edited field. (The same is true about using the BLANK WHEN
> ZERO clause).
> 
> The reason that a VALUE SPACE is invalid relates to the MOVE rules which (in
> the '85 Standard - on page VI-104) states,

It seems different rules are applied between the VALUE clause and
the MOVE statement.  According to the COBOL 2002 standard,

| ISO/IEC 1989:2002
| 13.16.61 VALUE clause
| 13.16.61.2 4) If the item is of class alphabetic or alphanumeric,
| literals in the VALUE clause shall be alphanumeric literals. [...]

Note that the class of a numeric-edited field is alphanumeric,
though the category of it is numeric-edited.  Thus, the VALUE clause
of a numeric-edited field must be an alphanumeric literal, and the
value SPACE would be legal here (even though it is not desirable).

Furthermore, as far as I can understand, the standard requires the
compiler *not* to check the value whether it matches to the picture
definition.  For example, the following definition is legal:

  01 X PIC ZZ9 VALUE "abc".

On the other hand, the MOVE statement requires numeric values to be
stored in numeric-edited items, and SPACE would be illegal here.

I'll fix this problem so that SPACE can be accepted.

Keisuke