Why is length declared as COMP is most cases

pingte · Active User Joined: 03 Dec 2005 Posts: 120 Location: india

Hi,

Why is length declared as COMP is most cases?

e.g. S9(4) COMP

Why is it not any other member of COMP family?

devidas-patil · New User Joined: 08 Jan 2007 Posts: 54 Location: pune

i guess S9(4) comp will take 2 bytes and most of the times for storing length of message in cics, null indicator we use s9(4) comp. thats why. and another thing if we use s9(5) then un-neccesarily it will take 4 byte and is we use usage. alos it help in case of Comp sync that why
please let me know if i a mwrong so that i can update to myself.

pingte · Active User Joined: 03 Dec 2005 Posts: 120 Location: india

My question is why we use COMP in particular for length..
why not COMP1,COMP2 or COMP3?

agkshirsagar · Posted: Fri Jun 01, 2007 11:30 am

I guess You mean 'length' in
Linkage section when we pass parameters through
OR
length of record in RDW
There is no explanation for this- system is designed to work with binary numbers (COMP) in those cases.
If you meant anything else then please elaborate.

pingte · Active User Joined: 03 Dec 2005 Posts: 120 Location: india

thanks abhijit...

i have one more doubt...

Why do u use COMP for null indicators... is it the same reason.. that system underastands Binary?

If we had used HEX (COMP-3)what would have have been the problem?
b'coz in HEX also we can indicate +ve / -ve values...
or this is also related to system design?

Can u please xplain?

socker_dad · Posted: Fri Jun 01, 2007 11:34 pm

If I understand you correctly, you simply want to know why we use COMP fields at all?

The simple answer is: to save storage.

Back when mainframes were new, storage was extremely expensive (and programmers were comparativley very cheap). So we developed was to cram as much information into as little space as possible - hence the COMP numeric fields.

That's the short answer. To understand why we use COMP, COMP1, COMP2 and COMP3, you have to look at the differences between them. For example, if I wanted to save space and didn't have to worry about whether the number was positive or negative - in the case of a table index for example - I woud use a COMP field. For other reasons to use the other types of COMP field, check out the programming manuals link at the top of the page.

William Thompson · Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 2:17 am

I hate to break this to you, but the COMP or COMP5 & 4?) are all valid binary. COMP1 & 2 are floating point and would never be used. Binary is used for length because the usual application for a length field is addition to an address and that is register math.

William Thompson · Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 2:19 am

dick scherrer · Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 2:21 am

Hello,

COMP fields are used in the situations you mentioned because IBM implemented as such. If you look at assembler code, you will see that many (nearly all) assembler instructions and system control blocks use 1, 2, and 4-byte binary fields as length, displacement, and incremental values. A 1-byte binary field is also a way to store 8 on/off switches in only 1 byte.

Most business code (quantities, rates, values, etc) are usually stored as comp-3 because the assembler business arithmetic instructions and editing require packed-decimal operands.

As s_d mentioned a big reason was to save space.

William Thompson · Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 2:40 am