Thanks a lot, Ed, for the clear explanation.

>>>>Hi everybody,
>>>>
>>>>In the compound index I use BINTOC function to convert everything to string. So my index expression will look like:
>>>>ccode+town+street+bintoc(stNum)+StNumExt... where stNum is Numeric 4. However, we found, that it sorts things incorrectly, e.g. 109 appears before 84. So, does it mean, what this function could not be used or I have some sort of data corruption...?
>>>>
>>>>Thanks in advance.
>>>
>>>Are you sure ? If your stNums <= 0x7FFFFFFF then it'd sort right.
>>>Cetin
>>
>>What is 0x7FFFFFFF in decimal? My manager showed me, that 109 was sorted prior to 89. I haven't examined it closely, but it seems, like they were sorted incorrectly. So, does it mean, what BINTOC() doesn't work correctly with numbers or I need to investigate this problem for the particular file?
>
>Did you ever try ? 0x7FFFFFFF perhaps?
>
>>
>>Here is an index expression: UPPER(STR(galleysort,3)+registry+city+STR(recgrp,1)+street+BINTOC(stnum,2)+stnumext+unit) I see by my own, what 109 preceeds 89.
>
>Because BINTOC() creates a binary string, BINTOC(109,2) > BINTOC(89,2). You get errors with # > 65535, < 0, containing fractions, etc. BINTOC(x,4) handles # > 2,000,000,000. All it does is it adds 0x80000000 to the number before converting it to a big-endian string representation of a 32 bit ULONG