Nice blog post, Chris!

Just for the record: The semicolon after the isolated %SYSFUNC call (the one-liner I had suggested) is useless. I certainly would have deleted it, had I known that this code would be further disseminated. The one-liner doesn't exactly address the original question anyway because it uses a character literal instead of a character variable. And of course it generates an error message when submitted in isolation (with or without the semicolon), but the correct answer (3) is written to the log as well.

Best regards,

Reinhard