Copyright (c) Digital Equipment Corporation 1995.  All rights reserved.

PRODUCT:  DEC PL/I for OpenVMS AXP, Version V4.0-5

OP/SYS:   OpenVMS AXP, Version 6.1

SOURCE:   Digital Equipment Corporation


SYMPTOM:

A PL/I pictured variable cannot be displayed using the F(w) PUT EDIT
format item on OpenVMS AXP systems.  This works on OpenVMS VAX systems.


DIGITAL RESPONSE:

This problem has been acknowledged by engineering and they plan to
address this in the next version of DEC PL/I for OpenVMS Alpha.


WORKAROUND:

Format the pictured variable using the P'picture' format item
instead.


ANALYSIS:

Section 9.2.4.5 of the

  PL/I for OpenVMS Systems Reference Manual

says that

    The F format item describes the representation of a fixed- or
    floating-point value ....

That does not mention picture values.  However, section 2.2.38 says
that

    Pictured variables have fixed-point decimal attributes, ....

and section 6.4.6.2 says that

    In PL/I all pictured values have the associated attributes
    FIXED DECIMAL(p,q), ....

You would expect that the F(w[,d]) format item could be applied to
pictured variables.  In fact this does work with VAX PL/I V3.5-124.  With
DEC PL/I V4.0-5 the output is displayed as 0.

The following program can be used to reproduce the problem.

$ type picfmt.pli
picfmt : procedure options(main);
    declare p pic'9999' init(1234);
    put edit(p,' ',p)(f(4),a,p'9999');
end picfmt;
$ pli picfmt
$ link picfmt
$ run picfmt ! OpenVMS AXP V6.1, DEC PL/I V4.0-5
   0 1234
$ run picfmt ! OpenVMS VAX V6.1, VAX PL/I V3.5-124
1234 1234

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