For WIDECHAR variable evaluation, half byte-pairs outside the ASCII range display as a '.' character. Use the EVALUATE command with the /h option to display hexadecimal values for each byte-pair. For example:
dcl wc wchar (16) init('003900370038'Wx); ... eval wc WC = .9.7.8. . . . . . . . . . . . . {widechar (16)} eval /h wc WC = 00 39 00 37 00 38 00 20 00 20 00 20 00 20 00 20 00 20 00 20 00 20 00 20 00 20 00 20 00 20 00 20 (hex) {widechar (16)}