RE: Missing from RPG/LE

Joe Teff wrote:
>What is a UCS2 data type?

UCS2 is perhaps more commonly known as "Unicode".
It's the 2 byte per character subset.

>Looking back at a handout from the Spring COMMON, I noticed that the
>%CHECK, %CHECKR, %XLATE and %SCANR BIF's are not on this list?
>Were they dropped or delayed?

As far as I know, these were never officially in
plan for this release.

>I frequently need to concatenate numeric fields onto text. %CHAR only
>works with graphics and date/time data types. I've started to use the
>%EDITW BIF to do this. For example, ITEMNO is a 7-digit field:
>
>  C          Eval         WarningMsg = 'Item ' +
>  C                       %EDITW(ITEMNO:'0       ') +
>  C                          ' is being obsoleted'
>
>Is this a good way to do it or is it better to move ITEMNO to a charater
>field before doing the concatenation? Or is there a better way to do it in
>a single statement. BTW, I'm on V4R2.

On V4R2, I would probably use %EDITC since it is
less dependant on the size of the numeric variable.

Oh yeah, I forgot about another enhancement.  In
our next release, %CHAR will now allow numeric
operands.  The result will be a varying length
string with leading sign if negative.  %CHAR(num)
is roughly equivalent to %TRIM(%EDITC(num:'P')).

One more thing now that my memory is back:  Hex
literals can now be used in places where a numeric
literal is expected.  If the hex literal represents
8 or fewer bytes, the value can be considered as an
unsigned numeric value.  That is, X'FD' in a
numeric context has the value 253 (not -3).

Cheers!  Hans

Hans Boldt, ILE RPG Development, IBM Toronto Lab, boldt@ca.ibm.com
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