Real programmers use ones' complement ;-) I don't know of any machine that uses a ten's complement representation, but the idea is appealing.
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Paul Gilmartin [0000000433f07816-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu] Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2020 10:21 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Here we go again; On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 13:50:48 +0200, R.S. wrote: > >It wasn't single byte per record in single table! It was (it *IS*) >element of some culture - to avoid dummy characters. >How many? It depends. For well constructed record the room for savings >is zero or close to zero. >For PFCSK ever date contains separators (2020-04-22 14:55:12), fields >are separated by blank etc. > I once wondered in these lists why, while F-type values wisely use 2's complement, P-type values are sign magnitude where 10's complement would provide 5 times the range in the same storage and avoid the need for a possible recomplement after subtraction. The response seems to be that 10's complement representation of negative values is unintuitive. That strikes me as PFCSK-think. Of course, there's the argument about reading dumps. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
