This is a vexed topic. PL/I always had full support for the FIXEDOVERFLOW condition for binary fixed values, but when much of the backend support for C and PL/I was merged, support for it, never provided in C, was dropped for PL/I too, not quite but almost silently. The FIXEDOVERFLOW condition is now supported only for decimal fixed, i.e., packed-decimal, values.
The LE has (or perhaps had) a callable service that enabled/disabled FIXEDOVERFLOW, and you can of course do this for yourself with a single, suitably framed SPM instruction. (It was mentioned but never fully described in trhe LE Vendor Interfaces manual; and there was not even an index entry for it in that manual.) Before these kinds of things---There have been gratuitousx additions too, like package in a language that supports multiple entries in a procedure block, but these can be ignored---started to happen to IBM implementations of PL/I I had had no animus against C. I thought of it as a FORTRAN dialect that people should be free to use if they wished to do so, as they are free to use, say, RPG II. That has changed as its juvenile disorders have infected PL/I support too. I am now actively hostile to it. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
