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Figure 1.13
Decimal representation (ASCII). (a) Decimal number consists of a string
of bytes in either packed (b) or unpacked (c) format. MSD/LSD indicate
most/least significant digit. |
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to deal with these numbers, and often high-end business machines (e.g., the IBM mainframes) implement a number of features to allow these numbers to be efficiently processed. The second problem is that there is no representation standard and manufacturers choose different implementations for storing and processing decimal data (i.e., length indicators, etc.). |
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Character strings are simply a sequence of a variable number of bytes. The length of the character string in bytes is specified in the instruction where this data representation is supported. The 256 representations available in a byte are defined by the ASCII standard format as representing various upper and lower case alphanumeric symbols |
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