ESQL/C: select works but shouldn't?

In the following ESQL/C statement, I'm not getting an error. $long vendor; $select id, prsp_no into $vendor from id_rec where id = 20240; (This is the distilled essence of a more complicated select statement that was mysteriously giving me an error.) When I originally isolated the problem, I was surprised that I wasn't getting error -254, "The number of host variables named in the INTO clause of this statement does not match the number of "?" place holders written into the statement." Upon re-reading the text of the error message carefully, and looking at the intermediate C code, I realized one possible reason why I wasn't getting that particular error - there are no "?" place holders. But this leaves me a bit at a loss - shouldn't this statement return some kind of error? The same lack of error happens if the number of columns I select are fewer than the number of host variables I'm selecting them into. William Harris (Standard disclaimers) CARS Information Systems, suite 412 http://www.carsinfo.com/~william/ 4000 Executive Park Drive Cincinnati, OH (USA) 45241