J4/02-0128

 

1st July 2002 

Page 1 of 1

Subject: 

Multiple currency strings

Author:Robert Jones, email: robert

@

jones0086.freeserve.co.uk

References:

1. 

Final Committee Draft for the proposed revision of ISO 1989:1985, COBOL standard

(version prior to production of the FDIS, which has not yet been distributed)

Comments:

The "12.2.6 SPECIAL-NAMES paragraph" provides the facility to specify several currency

signs for both alphanumeric and national coded character sets.

However, it does not specify the consequence of the value of literal-7 being specified more

than once.  While SR22 specifies that "No two occurrences of literal-8 may be the same

value.", there is no similar statement for literal-7 in SR18.

I  think  that  there  should  be  such  a  sentence  in  SR18  that  distinguishes  between

alphanumeric and national characters, but as an alternate solution, there could be a general

rule specifying that when an individual value for literal-7 is specified more than once, the last

encountered value is the one that is used.

The 1985 standard and its two amendments only allowed one CURRENCY SIGN clause, so

there would be no incompatibility problems whichever of these approaches is followed.