Numeric Fields Containing Illegal Characters When Using a DEPENDING ON Phrase of an OCCURS Clause

In Visual COBOL, if you fail to initialize a numeric data item that is used in a DEPENDING ON phrase of an OCCURS clause appropriately, a COBRT163 Illegal character in numeric field error is displayed at run time, because the data item is initialized to SPACES if no value is specified. In RM/COBOL, the data item is initialized to ZERO, and therefore, the error does not occur.