Establishing Length and Distance

You are no longer allowed to use the DESCRIBE DISTANCE statement to establish the length and distance of fields. Instead, you have to use one of the new statements DESCRIBE DISTANCE ... IN BYTE MODE or DESCRIBE DISTANCE ... IN CHARACTER MODE.

The statement DESCRIBE FIELD ... LENGTH is also obsolete and you must use one of the new statements DESCRIBE FIELD ... LENGTH ... IN BYTE MODE or DESCRIBE FIELD ... LENGTH ... IN CHARACTER MODE, instead.

Using the statement DESCRIBE FIELD ... TYPE feld previously returned the type C for any structures. In Unicode programs, the statement now returns u for flat structures, and the type v for deep structures.

There are no changes with the DESCRIBE FIELD ... TYPE ... COMPONENTS ... statement in Unicode systems. Additionally, the DESCRIBE ... OUTPUT LENGTH ... statement still provides the output length in characters.