On Mon, 23 Jul 2007 08:23:38 -0600, Steve Comstock wrote:
>
>Depends what you mean.
>
>x'FACE' is a hexadecimal number, right? (= 64206 in decimal,
>if an unsigned number).
>
>c'FACE' is one way of representing it in EBCDIC
>
>So you want to convert c'FACE' to x'FACE'?
>
>Or are you talking zoned decimal, packed decimal,
>or floating point numbers?
>
>Give us some info on the parameters that bound your
>problem.
>
There's a pervasive ambiguous and careless usage in this area.
One of my favorite (not!) examples is:

    Title: z/OS V1R7.0 MVS Assembler Services Reference ABE-HSP
    Document Number: SA22-7606-07

91.0          ENQ -- Request Control of a Serially Reusable Resource
     * 91.1 Description
  91.1.8 Parameters

   qname addr
          Specifies the address of an 8-character name. The name can contain 
any valid
          hexadecimal character. ...

OK.  The adjectives "valid" and "hexadecimal" appear to be restrictive -- It's
pretty hard to expand the scope of "any".  I'd infer that some characters are
not valid, and the qname can not contain them.  Where are the valid characters
enumerated?  Are they the same as the characters called "valid" in the JCL
manuals?  And does the use of "hexadecimal" imply that the only characters
which the qname may contain are '0', '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8',
'9', 'A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', and 'F'?  Or that the addressed qname must be
expressed in assembler language as a hexadecimal self-defining term?

The meaning would be clearer if the two adjectives were omitted and it
simply said "any character".

-- gil

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