Sql in Cobol worked in oracle 7 but not in 8

I have a little bit of code from a Cobol program here at work that works fgin e in oracle 7 but in the transfer to 8 I am getting an error ora-01841. Here is the peice of code that was previoulsy used.

p-date picx(8).

exec sql

     select nvl(:p-date, null)
            into 
           :p-date from dual

exec sql

      update p
          set 
          status =:p-status,
          date = to_date(:p-date, 'yyyymmdd')

I am not overly proficient in cobol but I beleive the p-date is initalized as a space or a blank but not null. I was wondering how I could get around this problem. I don't care if the date is null as you can see above.

Adam Received on Wed Oct 17 2001 - 17:40:32 CEST