There are likely thousands of such situations in the data areas books, all related to the fact that the data areas books are generated by tooling based on the assembler source which has defined these (and similar) fields as "F" (and similarly for a halfword that is "H") which are, by assembler definition, "signed".
No by-hand updates will be made to the book; any changes like this require source change. And while a source change might happen when justified, there has to be something to change it to. As far as I can see there is no way to define fixed data as "unsigned" (whether doubleword, fullword, or halfword). I'll check in case I'm wrong. "A" would be "wrong" too in that it would be reported as an address (which is clearly wrong). If there is no direct approach (e.g., DS FU), this might be something that you're just going to have to live with (and grimace over). It's been that way ever since these fields were defined (30-ish years ago). Perhaps these could be changed from F'0' to XL4'00 which I think would result in "BITSTRING" which actually makes some sense here (more sense than "signed"). Or perhaps we change all of the fullword "SIGNED"s in those books to something more generic such as "FULLWORD" (I notice that CVTLSO is marked as "DBL WORD") Peter Relson z/OS Core Technology Design ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
