The point is that people mis-use the word hex as though it described a type of data.
"Field X contains character data" -- quite possibly true. "Field Y contains floating point data" -- quite possibly true. "Field Z contains hex data." -- No, there is no such thing as "hex data" (or perhaps more correctly, the assertion is a truism -- all data is hex data). Usually people say "hex data" (imprecisely) when they should say "unprintable bytes" or "otherwise uncharacterized or unrecognized data": "What's in that field?" "I don't know -- it's just a bunch of hex." But as John says, hex is not a data type, it is a way of compactly representing *any* data, no more, no less. C9C2D4 makes a certain amount of sense to those of us in this industry. 110010011100001011010100 is the same thing but much harder to wrap your arms around. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) Sent: Friday, September 19, 2014 2:55 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Data Conversion In <cae1xxdghzfrrsvdf5u83dmhsgnte12b8akd3u0erbzjkqo3...@mail.gmail.com>, on 09/18/2014 at 11:21 AM, John Gilmore <[email protected]> said: >Except for IBM's Hexadecimal Floating Point, which in fact does real >hexadecimal (instead of binary of decimal) arithmetic, hexadecimal is >not a data type at all: it is a compact external representation of bit >strings, any instance of which can have different interpretations in >different contexts. Hexadecimal is most certainly a data type, although not one generally applicable to zArchitecture. Both decimal and hexadecimal data can be manipulated without binary logic elements, although I can't imagine wanting to do so except on a demo mechanical device. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
