The separate-sign-and-magnitude representation of packed decimal was inherited from IBM's decimal machines, the IBM 705 and its sequelæ. It was of bone thrown to business users, who with the Systerm/360 were being moved to a 'do everything' binary machine.
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
