Transact V and Transact/iX Enhancements

• Literal strings and numeric constants can now be passed as parameters in the PROC verb.

• Transact now provides a method for increased decimal precision in arithmetic expressions.

The parameter list for the PROC statement has two additional types of parameters. A programmer-defined character string can be passed by placing the string within quotes, similar to other languages. The default is to pass this literal as a 16-bit address. To change the literal to a byte address, precede the string with a "%", the same as with variables. The other parameter type is to pass a numeric value. The numeric constant is passed by value.

Examples:

PROC ASCII (65, 10, %"abc", &(numchar));
PROC FWRITE (#FILEID(TRANOUT), "Hello", -5, 0);

The second Transact enhancement increases decimal precision in arithmetic expressions (IF, LET, REPEAT, and WHILE verbs) via the new !PRECISION compiler command. A specified minimum number of decimal places is maintained for all packed-decimal intermediate results when calculating the value of an arithmetic expression. This minimum number is used only if the expression's default evaluation method would have maintained fewer decimal places.

Example:

!PRECISION(5) maintains at least five decimal places.