Operands

You can specify an operand for an expression in one of the following ways:

Detailed descriptions of these operands are presented in this section.

In addition to its actual data portion, certain operands can include an optional data-type. A data-type consists of a valid data-type code, optionally preceded by a length declaration. The following table shows the valid data-type codes. If a length is not specified with a data-type, then the default length is used.

For literal operands, the default length column in the following table does not apply. If the optional length declaration is not specified, the product will use the minimum number of bytes required to store the literal value.

Valid data-types used with operands

Data-type code	Data-type description	Min/max length	Default length
C	Fixed-length character string	1-32767	1
F	Signed fixed-point binary¹	1-16	4
P	Packed decimal	1-16	4
Z	Zoned decimal ¹	1-31	8
X	Unsigned fixed-point binary	1-16	1
A numeric precision can be specified for these types, indicating the number of decimal digits to the right of an assumed decimal point. The precision is a value between 0 and 14; if not specified, it is assumed to be 0.

To better identify the different data types as they relate to a COBOL or PL/I program, use the following table to examine the length and comparable data-types to operands.

Programming language data-type equivalents

COBOL	Fast Path/EP expression language	PL/I
PIC X(4)	4C	Char (4)
PIC S9999 Comp	2F	Fixed Bin (15)
PIC S99999 Comp 3	3P	Fixed Dec (5)
PIC 999 PIC 999V99	3Z 5.2Z	PIC ‘999’ PIC ‘999V99’
PIC 9999 Comp	2X	Fixed Bin (15)

Operands

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