Re: Identifting sign in COMP data



On Thu, 28 Jun 2007 04:32:05 -0400, "Rick Smith" <ricksmith@xxxxxxx>
wrote:

For instance in COMP-3 data , if the last nibble is 'C' then we say it
is positive and if it is 'D' or 'F' we say it is negative.

Actually 'F' is unsigned, assumed positive.

In 1980 I worked in a shop that moved from IBM Mainframe DOS to IBM
Mainframe OS. One thing we had to do was change many programs to
move old data from unsigned to signed and back again before
comparisons. That was because the way they stored unsigned numbers
changed with the operating system. Same CoBOL, but the operating
system changed how the numbers were stored.
.



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