RE: strange behavior with MOVEL, RPGIII

>This is news to me, by the way.  I've never run into this 
>before, and I'm not sure I like it!

I'm a bit surprised you haven't seen it Joe.  I ran into it many moons ago
when doing conversions.  It's one of the subtle things that trips people up
when dealing with the MOVEx opcodes.  And that's all I'm going to say on
that.

For the enlightenment of the archives, lurkers and those without access to
the web, Infocenter CD or printed manuals, here then is the V5R1 ILE RPG
Reference, page 398:

"Moving Character, Graphic, UCS-2, and Numeric Data
When a character field is moved into a numeric result field, the digit
portion of each character is converted to its corresponding numeric
character and then moved to the result field. Blanks are transferred as
zeros. For the MOVE operation, the zone portion of the rightmost character
is converted to its corresponding sign and moved to the rightmost position
of the numeric result field. It becomes the sign of the field. (See Figure
287 on page 624 for an example.) For the MOVEL operation, the zone portion
of the rightmost character of factor 2 is converted and used as the sign of
the result field (unless factor 2 is shorter than the result field) whether
or
not the rightmost character is included in the move operation. (See Figure
289 on page 636 for an example.)"

The examples are graphics and I can't readily include them, but there are in
fact examples that actually demonstrate this behaviour.