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From: awd@dbase.A-T.COM (Alastair Dallas)
Newsgroups: comp.databases,comp.lang.c,comp.sys.ibm.pc.programmer,sci.math.num-analysis
Subject: Re: BCD Encoding?
Summary: Some BCD help
Keywords: BCD, dbase
Message-ID: <528@dbase.A-T.COM>
Date: 13 Apr 90 17:53:08 GMT
References: <2024@naucse.UUCP> <1990Apr10.193710.20246@uwasa.fi> <17583@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU>
Organization: Ashton Tate Development Center Glendale, Calif.
Lines: 19


BCD numbers, in general, are "packed"--that is, two decimal digits are stored
in a byte.  A hex dump of the number 123 might look like:

		12 30      

(Note that a hex dump is as good as a decimal BCD dump.)
Other information stored with each number is the sign (+/-), the exponent
(so you know where the decimal point goes--some implementations are fixed
point, however, and don't need this) and the exponent and the sign of the
exponent.

Hope that helps--I'm just not at liberty to describe our .mem file format.
BCD numbers are not proprietary, but there are a lot of different formats
for BCD and I can't discuss specific nuances.

/alastair/

Disclaimer> No corporate, just programmer-a-programmer :-)