A little more clarity would be helpful here. Except for IBM's Hexadecimal Floating Point, which in fact does real hexadecimal (instead of binary of decimal) arithmetic, hexadecimal is not a data type at all: it is a compact external representation of bit strings, any instance of which can have different interpretations in different contexts.
Any data type can, that is, be initialized using some hexadecimal value. The appropriate answer to Scott's question depends crucially upon what he is getting from the COBOL program he mentions, and I am not sure that we yet know definitively just what that is. 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
