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  3. June 2015

Re: The case of outnumbered numerator

On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 12:40 PM, Booth Martin <booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
My first thought is to do it the other way round. Put the letter to the
front, not to the rear. A99999,B00000, B00001... etc.

You're missing a couple of key points though. First, it's not like
he's really looking to make the first character a "digit" and the
subsequent characters "letters". He wants to make *every single
character* able to take any of 36 possible values. For example, at
some point, the field in question will have the value '9AA3XY'. He
wants the next one to be '9AA3XZ', and then the one after that to be
'9AA3X0'.

The second crucial point is: He wants to keep the natural EBCDIC sort
order. (Or collating sequence, to use IBM's terminology.) In EBCDIC,
the letters come before the digits. So the value 'Z99999' actually
comes *before* '000000', or indeed, anything starting with zero. The
next value after 'Z99999' would be '0AAAAA'.

John Y.

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