Evaluating data items (intrinsic functions)

You can use intrinsic functions to determine the ordinal position of a character in the collating sequence, to find the largest or smallest item in a series, to find the length of data item, or to determine when a program was compiled.

About this task

Use these intrinsic functions:

CHAR and ORD to evaluate integers and single alphabetic or alphanumeric characters with respect to the collating sequence used in a program
MAX, MIN, ORD-MAX, and ORD-MIN to find the largest and smallest items in a series of data items, including USAGE NATIONAL data items
LENGTH to find the length of data items, including USAGE NATIONAL data items, and BYTE-LENGTH to find the length of data items in bytes, including DBCS data items
WHEN-COMPILED to find the date and time when a program was compiled

Related concepts
Unicode and the encoding of language characters