Charles Mills wrote | Hex is not a kind of data.
and I think we all sympathize with the point he is making. There is, however, some real hexadecimal data around, beginning with its use in IBM 7090 channel programming. For the System/360 and its sequelæ the exponent of an HFP number is represented in storage as a (biased) hexadecimal number and operated upon using hexadecimal arithmetic. (This is the rationale for the PL/I characterization of a fullword, single-precision HFP value as binary float (21) and not binary float(24) although the mantissa does in fact contain 24 bits.) 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
