/FREE & MOVE

[bmorris@xxxxxxxxxx]

>From: "Phil" <sublime78ska@yahoo.com>
>Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2002 11:17:50 -0500
>
>I am wanting to convert a pgm to use /FREE.  Can I move a character field
to
>a data structure with an OPCODE other than MOVE?  What about moving a
>character to a packed field.

Phil, a data structure is also a character field, so you can use EVAL.  Or
use EVALR, if the data structure has a different length from the character
field.

To move a character to a packed field, there's no straightforward solution.
If the character field ever has "negative" numeric data or implied decimal
points, say '1234M', then you should defined a zoned overlay for your
character field and assign from the zoned overlay.  If your numeric data
is always positive, calling 'atoi' will work as long as the data isn't too
long (9-10 digit limit).  'atoll' is better, with a limit of about 18
digits.
(Search the archives for 'atoi'.  If you want to use 'atoll', it's
identical
to 'atoi', but it returns 20i 0.)

There may be better support for character-to-numeric in the future, but I
doubt that it will handle the cases where you MOVE '1234M' and get -12345,
nor the cases where you MOVE '12345' to -987654321 and get -987612345.
Not that anyone actually has any code that does this :)

Barbara Morris