RE: Character to Numeric

Brad wrote:
>Read as much into my post as you like, Hans.  You're still
>wrong. Take this offline if you want to chat more.  If you
>have something personal against me (which it seems), the
>entire list doesn't need to be a part of it.

Brad:  Where was I wrong?  Was I wrong when I claimed that
your #CtoN procedure returns the wrong value when I fed it
the string '123456789123456789.123456789'?  Was I wrong to
claim that your return has the same behavior as "atof"?

Nothing personal here.  There may well be RPG programmers
out there using your procedure and expecting better
answers than what atof offers.  They need to know exactly
what the limitations of #CtoN are.  And YOU need to either
document those limitations or fix them.  (The fix is easy
and involves adding %INTH and (R) to one statement.)

Fact is, this is exactly how the "Open Source" community
works.  Someone publishes some code, others review it,
find bugs, and often suggest improvements.  That's why
code such as Linux and Apache have such high quality.  In
that community no one posts code publically without the
expectation that doing so will help the author to improve
the code.  I suggest reading up on the concept of "ego-
less programming", first popularized by Weinberg in his
1971 book "The Psychology of Computer Programming".

Have a nice weekend!


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

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