An operand of class NATIONAL may be compared with an Alphabetic data item, an Alphanumeric data item, a DBCS data item, a Nonnumeric literal, or a DBCS literal.
The data item or literal that is not a national item is treated as though it were moved, in accordance with the rules of the MOVE statement, to an elementary data item of class national and the same logical length. The converted value is then compared to the national operand. If the items are of different length, the shorter item is padded to the right with the padding character specified in the Padding Character compile option, or the equivalant process option. The default is the UCS-2 single-byte space character if the non-national operand is a single-byte item, or the UCS-2 double-byte space character (NX"3000") if the non-national operand is a double-byte item.