HP Basic anomaly in Print Using

Question

As I understand it, the following statement:

print using "<0>#,##", 1234

outputs:

1,234

which makes sense; leading zeros (of which there are none) and five characters available for the five characters we want to output. Another statement which I understand is:

print using "<0>#####,#######", "12345678"L

which outputs:

00,012,345,678

again, makes sense given my understanding of the formatting characters; 14 characters available for the digits, commas, and leading zeros.

What I don't understand is how:

print using "<0>####,#######", "12345678"L

can output:

00,012,345,678

Surely that's one too many leading zeros? Surely it should be:

0,012,345,678

I can see that sometimes a leading zero is added over and above the length specified, if otherwise the output would start with a leading comma, such as in this example:

print using "<0>###,#######", "12345678"L

which produces

0,012,345,678

despite seemingly not reserving enough space. But is the previous example a bug in Basic, or am I missing something here?

Answer 1

Looks like bug. It adds a bonus leading zero when <0> and the thousands separator play together. That <0> should count for 1 position.

It reproduces for me under Basic 1.3 (OpenVMS 8.3) and 1.7-000 on OpenVMS 8.4. I used smaller test values to avoid creating confusion/interaction with the max integer size of "Ten digits of precision for LONG integers" Basic Ref manual.

Btw.. good use of the "nnn"L. That pre-empts any (implied) conversion discussion. I would move the comma, to the end or start of the ### sequence to avoid implying a specific position.

As a (but-uggly) workaround, you might use FORMAT$ ( val, format-string ). It has the same problem, but the program will get a change to tweak the result.

$ cre tmp.bas
 1      OPTION TYPE = EXPLICIT, SIZE = INTEGER LONG, CONSTANT TYPE = INTEGER
        print using "<0>###,", 1234
        print using "<0>###,", 123
        print using "<0>###,", 12
        print using "<0>###", 1234
        print using "<0>###", 123
        print using "<0>###", 12
 Exit
$ bas tmp
$ link tmp
$ run tmp
1,234
00,123
00,012
1234
0123
0012