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  3. February 2012

Re: Weirdness in a zoned decimal field

Hi, James:

Joe Pluta got it exactly right! :-)

This was "normal" on IBM mainframes and their I/O devices, specifically, IBM 80-column punched card readers and punches (back in the day).

It goes all the way back to Binary Coded Decimal (BCD), which pre-dates EBCDIC.

Hope that helps ...

Mark S. Waterbury

> On 2/28/2012 2:34 PM, James Lampert wrote:
Joe Pluta wrote:
Yes, this is normal (if you're old and grizzled). C and D identified
positive and negative for signed numbers, while F denoted an unsigned
(and thus positive) field. Or so I recall.
Normal on *what*??? (And I've got a few gray hairs myself).

In 17 years of dealing with zoned decimal numbers on AS/400s, and
regularly seeing them at the hexadecimal level, I've never seen such a
thing. Neither has any QuestView customer ever reported a file with
C-zoned digits in a zoned decimal field.

--
JHHL

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