J3/13-225 To: J3 From: Dan Nagle Subject: Characters in formatted records Date: 2013 December 29 The deficiency: The character set is processor-dependent. Thus, presumably, so is the division of characters into control characters and graphic characters. The processor must allow any graphic character to be printed in a formatted record, but is allowed to forbid a set of control characters from appearing in a formatted record. However, which control characters are so forbidden cannot be detected by a program (at least, not without non-obvious, and possibly processor-dependent tricks). With ever-larger character sets supported by processors, diagnosis of "character format-ability" would be helpful to diligent programmers. The proposal: Give the programmer the ability to detect whether a character may be included in a formatted record. This might be something as simple as is_formatable() to return a s-d-l value when given a character of any kind supported by the processor. With such a diagnostic intrinsic, the programmer could choose the appropriate action when device-control-2 is not allowed in a formatted record, for example, substituting a blank.