The PACKED-DECIMAL phrase is specified for internal decimal items. Such an item appears in storage in packed-decimal format. There are 2 digits for each character position, except for the trailing character position, which is occupied by the low-order digit and the sign. Such an item may contain any of the digits 0 through 9, plus a sign, representing a value not exceeding 18 decimal digits. The sign representation is shown in Figure 12.
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The maximum length of a packed-decimal computational item is 63 decimal digits.
PACKED-DECIMAL may also be specified for date and time items whose FORMAT literal contains only conversion specifiers. These conversion specifiers must only be able to contain numeric digits.
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