At most four decimal digits are required to represent any 12-digit binary value, and at most three hexadecimal digits are required to represent one. Anciently, a useful display distinction betrween Sxxx, system, and Udddd, user, ABEND codes was usual and convenient.
It had about it an element of the arbitrary, but that did not lessen its usefulness, and familiarity made alternatives all but unthinkable. Unlike people of later generations, who had hexadecimal calculators available to them ab initio, I can do mental hexadecimal arithmetic and decimal<==>hexadecimal conversions quickly because I had to be able to do so. Even so, I find an S0c4 perspicuous and an S0196 opaque. I can of course convert one into the other once it occurs to me to do so, but that is not the point. The difference in length also has the obvious merit that it disambiguates code type in the absence of one of the prefixes S | U, which are/were redundant and would until recently have been perceived as [not wrong certainly but] unidiomatic. 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
