[Simh] PDP7/DECsys bug

[Daniel Baum]

>Might turn out to be a bug in a non-floating-point
> instruction that's used by the formatter to produce the print
> representation of FP numbers, rather than an actual FP instruction error.

Thanks. I'll try what you suggested.

>
>> I'd also like to draw your attention to a problem with TOPS-10 Cobol.
>>
>> Under Cobol-74, a simple numerical variable, declared with "PIC 99",
>> will print out as "0J" if its value is 1, "0K" if its value is 2, and
>> "0L" if its value is 3.
>
> This sounds very much like "overpunched signed" representation of negative
> numbers.  Google for "overpunched sign" or see, for example, this extract
> from the HP 3000 Cobol manual:
>

This seems to be the answer. I would never have found that on my own. 
However, I still don't understand why it's showing negative values. pic S99 
shows the sign to be negative, as does the overpunching itself.

Thanks again,


Daniel