Re: Alternative to MOVEA?

>Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 13:46:03 -0500
>From: "Mike Naughton" <mnaughton@juddwire.com>
>
> .... But I still like using MOVEs to put
>characters into decimal fields and vice versa -- I know I could use data
>structures or atol() or %EDITC, but MOVE is simple, and it works. And now
>I have this MOVEA thing. . .)

>What do you think? (and, thanks!)

Mike, if you're asking whether I think there's a case for blessing MOVE
and its friends by adding them to the set of free-form opcodes, then
no, I don't think so.

Your particular function of setting everything after a certain array
element might be a common enough problem to warrant some special syntax
to accomplish easily.  But your particular case is another one of the
kind where the array isn't even necessary.  A simple substring will do:

   EVAL  %subst(field : start) = *all'*'

Regarding moving between characters and numerics, MOVE and MOVEL have
some very odd behaviour that doesn't really have much use these days.
Basically, the "character" form of the numeric data is really the
zoned value.  So -12345 becomes '1234M'.  When the numeric value and
character value are the same length, it's easy to use a zoned/character
overlay to get the same results.  Where they are different lengths ...
well, then you get into the really bizarre behaviour that I think would
be better spelled out in the code.  MOVE   A   B looks too innocuous, if
what it's really doing is overlaying the last 3 digits of B with some
new digits, leaving the rest the way they are.

Barbara Morris