As far as I know, you cannot. There is a good reason for this.

However, because PL/I provides the means to give a format specification

in which the field width, repeat factors, etc,

are provided at run time, you have pretty much the same facility.

Hi

Yes i think you can do this by using preprocessor features
you can define your different formats in preprocessor variables like this"


%dcl     (format1, format2,format3)   char;

%format1 = '(a(5),x(2),2 f(8),x(1),a(20))' ;    
%format2 = '(f(3),f(12))' ;
%format3 = '(f(7,2),a(5),x(1),f(6))';

and then later in your program do like this:


put skip edit(str1,ix1,ix2,str2) format1 ;

put skip edit(ix3,ix4) format2 ;

put skip edit(flt1,str3,ix4) format3 ;



and when you compile your program you can see in your Listing that format1,2,3 is changed with that formats that you define with
preprocessor variables.

and you can write all your favourite formats in a file and add this file in a Maclib with a name for example "formats" and then
use this in your program

%include formats;


i hope this be usefull for you

thanks

 

That doesn't provide any additional facility than coding the format in the program,

and certainly doesn't provide the ability to change the format specification at run-time.

The method I previously suggested in this thread permits format specifications to be changed

at run time.

In addition to the above, a run-time picture specification can be used

(obtained from any input file) via the EDIT built-in function.