"Hexadecimal" might be the most misused word in our industry. "Any hexadecimal character" -- umm, can you give me an example of a non-hexadecimal character? Is x'C1' a hexadecimal character? Sure looks like hex to me.
Hexadecimal is a *method of representation*. If I have a byte that contains b'0101 1010' that is kind of a tedious way of writing it. The industry formerly used octal and wrote it as 0132 but that is kind of tedious and maps poorly to 8-bit (as opposed to 6-bit) characters. x'5A' conveys it fairly well. That method of conveyance is called hexadecimal. The byte is not hexadecimal: it's the same byte as it was when I wrote it as b'0101 1010'. "Non-printable" (or sometimes non-alphanumeric/national) is the word people are looking for. No byte is hexadecimal. All byte values may be represented in hexadecimal. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Wednesday, December 4, 2019 9:39 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: COPYING PDS TO PDS ... On Wed, 4 Dec 2019 07:18:11 +0000, Vernooij, Kees (ITOP NM) - KLM wrote: >Jeez Gil, > >There is nothing restrictive to 'hexadecimal', only to 'any' or 'some'. >Between quotes you can put *any* hex char in a dsname, without quotes you can >use only the *alphanumeric* hex chars. (And you *can* of course use all 256, >if you accept JCL errors). > What meaning does "hexadecimal" add in "any hexadecimal character" Is it any different from "any character"? If not, "hexadecimal" is a noise word. I'm similarly perplexed by IBM's frequent usage, as in: https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSLTBW_2.1.0/com.ibm.zos.v2r1.ieaa200/ENQ_Description.htm ... The name can contain any valid hexadecimal character. ... I visualize a Venn diagram: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venn_diagram where invalid hexadecimal characters and valid non-hexadecimal characters are prohibited. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
