Re[2]: Converting from packed to character in Query/400

 
 John Dorn wrote,
 
 >I believe you are mistaken about ILE C handling packed decimal.  You 
 >can declare (and use) packed decimal variables after including 
 >decimal.h.  Check out the ILE C/400 Programmer's Reference index >for 
 the few (very) references to using packed decimals.
 
 Thanks, John.  I think I may be confused. I should have used the term 
 "zoned decimal", rather than "packed decimal", but I'm not sure what the 
 differences are.  I expect it is how the sign is stored. In the numbers in 
 my file, the sign is stored in the low order digit.  When the sign is 
 negative, the low order digit is stored as, e.g. 'J' instead of '1'. (I 
 think this was once referred to as "sign overpunch", but let's not get into 
 that History thing, again!) 
 
 What led me to believe that C would not handle this, is that I included 
 the file DDS in my C program, and found that the zoned decimal fields were 
 converted to character.  The following text is from the compiler listing:
 
 |#include "qryo"                                                         
 |/* --------------------------------------------------------------------- 
 |/* PHYSICAL FILE: C40020/QQRYOUT                                        
 |/* FILE CREATION DATE: 97/08/18                                         
 |/* RECORD FORMAT: QQRYOUT                                               
 |/* FORMAT LEVEL IDENTIFIER: 4FA4FA78BB18D                               
 |/* --------------------------------------------------------------------- 
 |typedef _Packed struct {                                                
 |   char WBS[13];                                                        
 |   char WBSDESC[30];                                                    
 |   char WBSLEV[2];                      /*  ZONED SPECIFIED IN DDS      
 |                                        /*  REPLACED BY CHARACTER TYPE  
 
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