BINARY affects the representation of binary data items.
| BINARY option syntax |
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Default is: BINARY(NATIVE)
Abbreviations are: None
Specify BINARY(NATIVE) to use the native binary representation format of the platform. For COBOL for Windows, this is little-endian format (most significant digit at the highest address).
BINARY(S390) indicates that BINARY, COMP, and COMP-4 data items are represented consistently with zSeries, that is, in big-endian format (least significant digit at the highest address).
However, COMP-5 binary data and data items defined with the NATIVE keyword on the USAGE clause are not affected by the BINARY(S390) option. They are always stored in the native format of the platform.
related references
Appendix B. zSeries host data format considerations