Now this question has bounced around a bit so I thought I should add a
little more confusion.

Some years ago on our bureau system here we had some Cobol and some RPG
programs which referred to the same numeric field. As it happened one
programmer erroneously referred to the field as unnumbered.

Now we all know that we get C for +, D for - and F for unnumbered but ...
and forgive me because the error has not been repeated and I cannot
remember whether the error was in the Cobol or the RPG and whether it was
the Cobol or the RPG which could not cope but the symptom was exactly the
same as Jerry is complaining about.

The solution to the problem (or cause) relates to the way any application
CASTs the data which it is trying to report.

It is not the standard which is wrong here but the conversion routine.

At 09:51 17/12/97 -0600, you wrote:
>At 12:43 PM 12/15/97 -0500, Therm-O-Link wrote:
>>Jerry Fochtman replies:
>>
>>>When QUERY detects the item is type 'Z' and the FIND value is
>>>positive, it actually performs 2 DBFINDs; one signed and one
>>>unsigned.....
>>
>>Yeah, I can see that's what it is doing.  My original question
>>still stands: Why?

<snip>

>HP has been quite active in working towards keeping SQL current
>with its various standards.  As such, they are reluctant to
>add 'extensions' to the SQL interface that are not in the
>standards.  I've had these discussions with HP in the
>past, in terms of the SQL interface.
>
>So perhaps the underlying issue is the conflict between
>HP's goals to adhere to the standard coupled with the
>inadequacy of the standards to address this issue, or perhaps
>a stand taken in the standards which explicitly excludes
>unsigned packed decimal....
>
>
>
>
>
>/jf
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_______________________________________________________
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