Subject: Re: Target for numeric operation too small

[JMBauman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Thanks Hans for your response, but I do not agree that truncation is never
an acceptable result.  If I am working on payroll or accounting, yes I
don't want truncations to occur.  But if I am working on a salesman growth
percentage report and I have one salesperson with 10000 percent growth
because he had two customers this month as opposed to none last month,  I
would rather not have to account for a much larger than expected maximum to
just to handle the exceptional ridiculous number. And when you have a
report running for maybe hours at a time, I could certainly accept
truncation.  I don't think RPG III was too kind in this regard, I think it
gave the programmer control of his program.

John M. Bauman
Lead Programmer
Ward Trucking
Second Avenue & Seventh Street, Greenwood
Altoona, Pa 16602

Voice: (800) 458-3625 Ext. 284
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JMBauman@Wardtrucking.com

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Yes, there is a way to avoid getting the overflow exception:
Fix the logic errors in your program that are causing the
numeric overflows.

RPG III was too "kind" in that it did not tell you when your
numerics overflowed, and instead quietly truncated values.

If you really do need your numerics truncated (and I really
can't think of any situation where truncation might be
useful and there isn't a better alternative), convert your
numeric value to character using something like
%EDITC(...:'X') and %SUBST the desired number of right-most
characters.

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