Re: XLATE

Peter wrote:
>What does
>    EVALR vlenfld = 1234"
> do? Personally, I would expect
>    MOVE 1234 vlenfld
>to do something similar.

The two are only slightly similar.  MOVE and MOVEL change
(respectively) the right-most and left-most characters of
the target field  leaving the other characters unchanged.
EVAL and EVALR modify the entire target variable, padding
with blanks if necessary. Furthermore, the MOVE and MOVEL
opcodes let you move  between character and numeric types
freely, which can, of course, lead to interesting results
for with operands of differing length.   Opcodes EVAL and
EVALR require exact type match.

So our conundrum was, do we treat MOVE and MOVEL the same
way as EVAL?  How do we handle mixed fix and varying char
arguments in the MOVEs?   All the  different combinations
made defining the behavior rather complicated,  and so we
decided to keep things simple  and make just one rule for
for the fixed syntax calcs. Besides, the prefered opcodes
these days are the ones that take free-form expressions!

Hans Boldt, ILE RPG Development, IBM Toronto Lab, boldt@ca.ibm.com

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