Of sorts

I program in COBOL on a mainframe computer by day (and sometimes by night). I also work with a widely-used sort routine into which you can pass information (parameters, or parms) to make the sorting go the way you want. Today a co-worker used a parm called NZDPRINT that I'd never heard of before. I could guess what it meant and what it did, but I had to look it up in the documentation to be sure. Here's what I learned:

ZDPRINT specifies if positive ZD [zoned decimal] summation results are to be converted to printable numbers.

ZDPRINT, the default, enables conversion to printable format. NZDPRINT prevents the conversion.

This option determines whether the sign byte of a positive summarized ZD field will be converted to a printable format. More precisely, the option specifies whether the zone of the last digit should be changed from a hexadecimal C to a hexadecimal F.