Thanks to all for the replies. Some comments/followup questions. First, just to be clear: I'm talking about packed decimal with a sign nibble, as the Subject: line says, not the perversion that's just a bunch o' nibbles with no sign.
Steve Comstock wrote: > Note that character decimal can also be positive or unsigned. >PACK and UNPK preserve the sign settings in both directions True-and not being rude (at least, not trying to), but: I don't see how this relates to my question. Or are you suggesting that the character versions could use a + sign in front to indicate that it's signed? Given that this is actually encryption, and a positive value might encrypt to a negative one, that turns out not to work, since +1 could encrypt to -1 and then when we decrypt that, we won't know whether the 1 should be signed or not. Elardus Engelbrecht wrote: >Of course, it is normal. >For example, this COBOL statement checks the data (From COBOL manual): > If Count-x is numeric then display "Data is good" >Look for NUMPROC compiler option and NUMCLS option for COBOL for example. >Try to do a COMPUTE with a character for a nice S0Cx abend. ;-D That isn't what I asked, or at least not what I meant to ask: I'm asking about AFTER it's back in packed form, whether most things will care if the sign nibble has changed from unsigned to signed positive. And: > Yes, you will get problems, especially if you intend to do comparisions + > calculations where signs are important. Other than CLC (which I would argue isn't how you should be comparing packed values), how does it matter? X + (unsigned 5) == X + (+5), no? (Yes, I see your example...that's, well, just plain strange!) Anyway, I'm left with what feels like a "Maybe". Which isn't what I'd hoped, but is what I feared. Thanks again, -- ...phsiii ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
