PACKED-DECIMAL Phrase

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 1.

IBM Extension
IBM Extension

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.

End of IBM Extension
End of IBM Extension