DECIMALOVERFLOW

The DECIMALOVERFLOW option controls the result of arithmetic operations that produce out-of-range numbers. Decimal numbers are stored as a mantissa and an exponent. Decimal overflow occurs when the result of a calculation is very large and can no longer be represented by the exponent portion of the decimal representation.

Data type

BOOLEAN

Syntax

DECIMALOVERFLOW = YES|NO

Arguments

YES: Allows overflow. A calculation that generates overflow will execute without error, and the results of the calculation will be NA.
NO: Disallows overflow. A calculation involving overflow will stop executing, and an error message will be produced. (Default)

Examples

Example 10-2 The Effect of DECIMALOVERFLOW

This example shows the effect of changing the value of the DECIMALOVERFLOW option.

When you execute a SHOW command such as the following without changing DECIMALOVERFLOW from its default value of NO, an error occurs.

SHOW 1000000.0 ** 133

When you change DECIMALOVERFLOW to YES, the same statement executes without an error and produces NA as the result of the operation. The statements

DECIMALOVERFLOW = YES
SHOW 1000000.0 ** 133

produce the following result.

NA