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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ToySoldier who wrote (28930)	8/31/1999 2:55:00 AM
From: axp	Respond to of 74651

OT Programmers did extreme things to save a byte in those days. I worked on a large enterprise system where a "reserved" or "no-data" value was needed for each datatype in the database. Instead of "wasting" a separate reserved value flag, it was unwisely chosen to be the data field filled with hex 20 (the ascii code for a space). Thus, if an integer field in the database contained the following values they would (intentionally) be displayed as blank space: Hex Decimal 20 32 1-byte integer 2020 8224 2-byte integer 20202020 538976288 4-byte integer Internally all calculations were fine - this just affected the display of the values on a screen or printout. But it drove people nuts more than once when they wondered why the number 32 never appeared for some data fields. P.S. These systems running this software are still in use today.