Chris Breemer writes:
 
>Could somebody tell me what the format of a "Zoned decimal (plus)"
>variable is. This seems to be used in Transact and DD/3000 but we have
>none of these products.
 
I think this was a format driven by key punches and I first encountered
it on IBM 360's. According to my ancient Transact manual it allocates
one byte per decimal digit except that the rightmost byte also contains
coding for the sign (if any).  The format of all but the rightmost byte
is ASCII. For the rightmost byte, see the table below for the ASCII
digit contained:
 
Low order digit...........: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Rightmost byte if positive: { A B C D E F G H I
Rightmost byte if negative: } J K L M N O P Q R
 
Yes, there can be both a positive and negative 0. As I recall you would
get the negative if a minus sign was overpunched on the 0 on the key
punched card. I think that effectively on the 3K you will not see a
negative 0 ever entered by the user.
 
Hope this helps.
 
Fred Ochs, Orbit Software