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It is not possible to change the meaning of returning *BLANK, even to have it return a single blank. The compiler treats both *BLANK and *BLANKS to mean "all blanks". Like all the figurative constants, the implied length of a figurative constant is the same as that of the associated field (or the associated return value in the case of the RETURN operation).
Please open another Idea to request a new special value such as *EMPTY to mean the empty literal to be used with character, UCS-2 or graphic data.
- IBM Power Systems Development
Hello.
I do not agree on the title for this idea - *blank and '' is not the same, nor does the documentation state this.
I understand your expectation of *blank => result = ' ', but *BLANK and *BLANKS are interchangable, they come from the days of only fixed length character variables. Changing this behaviour would break many programs after a recompile!
A new constant like *empty (or *entrystring) would make sense, it can be difficult to spot the difference between '' and '<space>' when glancing source code. Here a new constant would make the code more readable.
Best regards
Christian Jorgensen
CEAC member