HP 3000 Manuals HP 3000 Manuals
Concept of Computer-independent Data Description To make data as computer-independent as possible, the characteristics or properties of the data are described in relation to a standard data format rather than to an equipment-oriented format. This standard data format is oriented to general data processing applications and uses the decimal system to represent numbers (regardless of the radix used by the computer) and the remaining characters in the COBOL character set to describe nonnumeric data items.