On Fri, 19 Sep 2014 17:26:17 -0700, Charles Mills wrote: >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). > Indeed. IIRC, the Assembler Services manual says (or did -- I haven't checked lately) of ENQ that the QNAME and RNAME may contain "any valid hexadecimal characters." Well, there are 16 characters that I'd call "hexadecimal": '0'-'9' and 'A'-'F'. Does this mean that only those 16 characters and no others may be used in QNAME and RNAME? And the adjective "valid" is either otiose or further rectrictive, implying that of those 16 some are "invalid" and may not be used. But which?
Perhaps they intended to say that QNAME and RNAME must be coded hexadecimal constants. But that's not true either. Someday when I'm in a bad mood, I'll submit an RCF. Somewhere it may say that DBCS characters are prohibited. I don't think that's exactly true either, when the DBCS constant can be represented in a number of bytes (or "valid hexadecimal characters") that fit in the field in the data area. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
