RevMedia

John Godfrey at MAFF has experienced some very interesting problems with scaled masked decimal conversions. (Essentially, scaling allows stored figures to be altered by a chosen order of magnitude BEFORE the MD conversion is applied. For more details see Technical Reference K-274).

When trying to MD01,Z a small number (in this case 0.1415), the system hung and needed to be rebooted. This occurs whenever the number to be OCONVed is less than half the number representing the order of magnitude represented by the scaling figure. Thus if the scaling figure was 2 (100) the system would OCONV 50 but fail on 49, if 3 (1000) 500 would work but 499 would fail. As this is a fatal error it should be trapped for when programming.