No negative values, that's for sure. No hardware support that I know other than the trick of padding a 0C byte and pretending it's packed, throwing away the trailing 0.
Our z/OS encryption product supports packed and we've talked about supporting binary decimal but have never had a request for it, so I assume it's not much of a thing. -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Friday, May 2, 2025 11:19 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Packed decimal sign nibbles On Fri, 2 May 2025 10:38:10 -0400, Phil Smith III wrote: >I can't answer this, but I've seen the x'001234' format called "binary >decimal", which always makes my head hurt a bit. OTOH it's unambiguous, which >is always A Good Thing. > Unambiguous, but is there hardware support? And for negative values? And for operations with mixed packed and "binary decimal"operands. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
