>Hi..
>
>what is the best deal on the conversion from old comp3 cobol format data to ascii?

Take it as a string, then chop by nibbles. Reserve the rightmost nibble for the sign. That is, IIRC, comp-3 was a BCD number, right?

Assume you have a byte from anywhere in the middle. Its value is then

Func Bcd2Num
para bcd
priv x
x=''
#define tbl1 ':;<=>?'
#define tbl2 'abcdef'
for i=1 to len(bcd)
	_asc = asc(subs(bcd,i))
	x=x+chr(bitshift(_asc,4)+48)+chr(bitand(_asc,15)+48)
endf
x=chrtran(x,tbl1,tbl2)
retu val(left(x,len(x)-1)) * iif(inlist(right(x,1),'c','f'),1,-1)

Wrote that on 9. March 1999, when these bit-oriented functions were in fPath.plb. Also keep in mind that this routine has no idea how many decimals does the result have. You'll have to divide it with 100 or whatever.