Language
Qedit works on files of standardized formats called languages. Most are programming languages: COBOL, FORTRAN, SPL, and Pascal. We provide the “language” JOB for files with 80 columns per line, without sequence numbers (e.g., batch job streams). The “language” Data is provided for files with a nonstandard line length (e.g., Set Length 45, Set Length 132), but less than or equal to 1,000 columns per line. The “language” Text is like the language Data, but for lines with less than 256 columns. The language of a file tells Qedit how long the records may be, where the sequence number goes, what compiler to use on the file, and much more.
For Qedit workfiles, the language is assigned to the file when it is created (see Set Lang, New and Text).
Qedit also determines a language for each external file (COBOL, COBOLX, SPL, FORTRAN, Pascal, RPG, Job, Text) by looking at the record length, the file code and the format of the first record. When external files are accessed, Qedit determines these attributes following rules that are defined in appendix B. There is no need to specify the Lang explicitly, unless there is an ambiguity (e.g., /Text datafile,UNN because the file has numbers in last eight columns).