CNTL Commands and Menus › Initiate Monitoring › Conditional Breakpoints › Length of the Comparison

Length of the Comparison

Explicitly define how many bytes of the left side or right side specification should be compared. Certain storage locations have implicit lengths:

• A register or COBOL BLL cell has an implicit length of four bytes
• The storage locations referred to by the CORE keywords MXR, MXS, and TAL have implicit lengths of four bytes
• The implicit length of a COBOL data name is its field length as defined in the DMAP
• The length of a literal is the number of bytes it contains; any length specification is ignored

Define both left side and right side lengths for a packed decimal (COMP‑3) comparison. For all other comparisons, define only one length. If you define both lengths, the smaller length is used.

The maximum permissible length for the left side or right side is 16 bytes for packed decimal data and 255 bytes for all other data types.