Hey Listers,

With Kevin Miller's help and the use of the IBMVBS utility from the CSL I have
been able to deblock the IBM mainframe tape which contains variable length
records (in EBCDIC, of course) on a tape that has variable length blocks into a
disk file containing variable length records readable by the HP still in EBCDIC.

The current problem that I'm having is that the program properly translates all
character fields that are in EBCDIC to ASCII but does NOT properly translate ANY
of the packed decimal fields in EBCDIC to numeric-edited fields in ASCII.  Using
FCOPY I have verified that the fields I'm looking for are still in the proper
packed decimal EBCDIC form.  My mainframe people are convinced that this
situation is a compiler bug.  I'm not sure.  I have tried both the 74 and 85
COBOL compilers giving the same results.

A example of a field is below:

Input field defined as PIC S9(9) COMP-3 in HEX:  049484071C
Output field defined as PIC +9(9) in ASCII:           +9<6=647?1

Any help is greatly appreciated.

John Hornberger
Sr. Systems Programmer
SPX Corporation
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