Good question, thanks Steve.

Actually encountered this very issue while repairing a "broken" cobol program on the mainframe a few years ago, where the developer changed the ordinal positions of the columns in the data set (by adding a column in ordinal position 1, which shifted all the other columns on) but did not change the variables in the cursor accordingly (using select * to populate the variables, of course) - really played havoc with the customer limits every time one was changed...