As of August 2021, the Enterprise PL/I for z/OS has provided the following functional enhancements.
Enhancements in usability in the 5.3 release
- The JSONTRIMR attribute indicates that the JSON functions will trim away any trailing blanks for the specified field.
- The UCHAR attribute specifies that a string holds UTF-8 data and that functions such as INDEX, SUBSTR, and VERIFY will handle it in a UTF-8 sensitive manner.
New built-in functions and pseudovariables
- The XMLUCHAR built-in function writes XML corresponding to a structure to a buffer as UTF-8.
- The SUBTO built-in function returns a substring, specified by its ending position, of a string.
- The SUBTO pseudovariable assigns a substring, specified by its ending position, of a string.
Compiler option enhancements
- The DEFAULT compiler option has these new suboptions: LAXQUAL | NOLAXQUAL
The DEFAULT(NOLAXQUAL) option specifies that when the compiler is resolving a reference to a name without any dot qualification, if the name is ambiguous in the block where it is first declared, but is a reference to a scalar in a parent block, then the compiler resolves the reference to be that parent block reference.
Details about the functional enhancements can be found in the Enterprise PL/I for z/OS 5.3 documents available on the IBM Documentation site https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/epfz/5.3
The English and Japanese PDF files are available for download from the Enterprise PL/I for z/OS library page at https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/enterprise-pli-zos-documentation-library
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions regarding the PL/I documentation, please send them to compinfo@cn.ibm.com.