RE: Date question

 >> I believe IIRC the date is actually stored as 4 byte binary...

On the DASD - Yes.

Other than in a dump of the DASD you will never see it in this format
however.  As the record is read by the OS the value is converted to the
appropriate character string as specified on the type L field in the file
(*ISO) if nothing specified.  So as far as your program is concerned it is
always a character string complete with separators.

DatFmt controls how it normally comes into the RPG program.  If no H-spec
entry (and the field is not otherwise declared in a DS or whatever) then it
will come in as *ISO.  Note that that may mean double conversion in cases
where a format other than *ISO was specified for the L-type field.

I think the notion was to follow the behavior of numerics (i.e. all database
numeric field types end up as packed unless you explicitly control them) -
the problem is that most RPGers don't understand the rules for numerics (as
is often made obvious during discussions here regarding prototyped numeric
fields) so making dates follow similar rules turns out to be not such a good
idea!


Jon Paris
Partner400

www.Partner400.com
www.RPGWorld.com