Finding the largest or smallest data item

To compare numeric items, including those that have USAGE NATIONAL, you can use MAX, ORD-MAX, MIN, or ORD-MIN. With these intrinsic functions, the algebraic values of the arguments are compared.

The MAX and MIN functions return the content of one of the arguments that you supply. For example, suppose that your program has the following data definitions:

05  Arg1   Pic x(10)  Value "THOMASSON ".
05  Arg2   Pic x(10)  Value "THOMAS    ".
05  Arg3   Pic x(10)  Value "VALLEJO   ".

The following statement assigns VALLEJObbb to the first 10 character positions of Customer-record, where b represents a blank space:

Move Function Max(Arg1 Arg2 Arg3) To Customer-record(1:10)

If you used MIN instead, then THOMASbbbb would be assigned.

The functions ORD-MAX and ORD-MIN return an integer that represents the ordinal position (counting from the left) of the argument that has the largest or smallest value in the list of arguments that you supply. If you used the ORD-MAX function in the previous example, the compiler would issue an error message because the reference to a numeric function is not in a valid place. Using the same arguments as in the previous example, ORD-MAX can be used as follows:

Compute x = Function Ord-max(Arg1 Arg2 Arg3)

The statement above assigns the integer 3 to x if the same arguments are used as in the previous example. If you used ORD-MIN instead, the integer 2 would be returned. The examples above might be more realistic if Arg1, Arg2, and Arg3 were successive elements of an array (table).

If you specify a national item for any argument, you must specify all arguments as class national.