Re: %DEC problems

"Wilt, Charles" wrote:
> 
> And if you happen to be at v5r3 you can simply use:
> 
> cuPD = %dec( %date: *ISO) );
> 
> and skip the conversion to character.
> 
> Question for the list....why did IBM improve %dec but not %int.
> 

%int wouldn't work for timestamps.  Even though an 8 byte integer is
defined as "20i", the maximum value has fewer than twenty digits, so any
timestamp after the year 999 wouldn't fit in an integer.  %INT would be
ok for dates and times, but we thought it was sufficient to enhance %DEC
to take d/t/z types.  If you're thinking that integers perform better
than decimal values, any tiny performance benefit of int over decimal
would be far far outweighed by the cost of actually extracting the
numeric value from the date.