On Wed, 15 Oct 2014 13:02:11 -0400, John Gilmore wrote: > >In general truncations to decimal digits are a bad, even diseased, >idea for binary data. > Reminds me on the time when, on ASSEMBLER-LIST, I wondered why Packed Decimal uses sign-magnitude rather than 10's complement representation.
o 10's complement affords a greater range of numeric values than sign-magnitude in the same storage (factor of 5). o 10's complement avoids the need for a recomplement pass in a subtraction when the sign of the result differs from the sign of either operand. Other contributors to that list assure me that no such recomplement is ever necessary. I continue to disagree. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
