There can be no objection to talking abouit hexadecimal values or the the use of hexadecimal strings. They are indeed the only practical reprersentation of addresses that we have available to us.
My point was the different one that a byte having the nominal value x'00' may in principle have any of the values x'00', x'01', x'02', . . . x'FE', x'FF'. If now these values are treated as unsigned binary integers they have the [equivalent decimal] values 0, 1, 2, . . . , 254, 255. Then if they are treated as signed binary integers they instead have the different [equivalent decimal] values +0, +1, +2, . . . , +127, . . . , -128, -127, . . . , -1. Giving a field the nominal value x'00' does not specify its value until that field is given an arithmetic data type. Similar differences also obtain for SBCS values: x'40' is a blank in EBCDIC; the equivalent ASCII space character has the value x'20'. Taken alone and out of a specific context hexadecimal values are ambiguous. They are not, however, bad, old-fashioned, or uncool. It is just that they are sometimes sufficient unto the day and sometimes not. 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
