RE: One function to Trim and Edit a number.

-----Original Message-----
From: John Rusling
Sent: Friday, July 03, 2009 12:29 PM
To: 'rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx'
Subject: Re: One function to Trim and Edit a number.

First: Use a better name. tred is appalling. It conveys nothing about
the purpose of the function unless you already know it means TRim and
EDit. This sort of name is typical of Unix rubbish like awk, grep, sed
etc. that are only meaningful once you already know what they mean
(which when I was young and foolish I used to think was cool). tred2
simply compounds the problem. Because this function is formatting a
number then perhaps formatNumber or fmtNbr would be a better name.

Yeah, I agree with your awk, grep, sed remarks but I still like
the compactness of tred.

Second: Make the function accept decimals. Until RPG supports
overloading or full descriptor support for numerics you have to
compromise by selecting an appropriate scale and precision. I would
suggest 30 digits with 9 decimal places.

Agree.

Third: Provide an optional parameter to specify the number of decimal
places required in the formatted output.

Playing with this.

Fourth: Increase the size of the character return value to allow for
suggestion 2.

Agree.

Fifth: Support user-defined edit codes 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9.

Good point.

Sixth: Add another optional parameter to control whether rounding or
truncation is performed on the input number if it has more decimals
than the required output.

Playing with this to.

Regards,
Simon Coulter.

Thanks for the suggestions.

John B.