GilYou are correct of course. When I ported PCRE to Classic z/OS I had in mind
the poor souls who are forced to work in Classic z/OS, JCL, Rexx. TSO, EBCDIC
and all. But yes, I wish that IBM would find a fool proof way to bring those
poor souls and their arcane systems to the twenty first century.
Ze'ev Atlas
On Monday, February 13, 2023 at 11:52:38 PM EST, Paul Gilmartin
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 2/13/23 11:35:23, Jonathan Scott wrote:
> Ze'ev Atlas wrote:
>> The real question is why, but really why, IBM had to introduce
>> this EBCDIC horror, where symbols like [,], ^ and some less
>> signifacant ones moved around dry leaves in the fall wind.
>
> That's a bit off-topic, but the answer is "Compatibility".
It's ironic that the Babel of EBCDIC code pages was architectured in a
misguided quest for compatibility ...
> Old physical printers and terminal had a limited number of
> different characters which they could print. To make it
> possible to print national characters, they simply provided an
> alternative physical set of printable characters for the same
> internal codes (for example print chain or train for a line
> printer, or golf ball or daisy wheel for a typewriter-style
> terminal).
... and persists in the name of compatibility with obsolete hardware devices.
> This occurred both for EBCDIC and ASCII computer systems.
The past tense does not apply to EBCDIC. ASCII desktop systems and WWW
are greatly recovering with the benefit of UTF-8. I see no such boon to
EBCDIC: How practical is it to use ISPF Edit, HLASM, Rexx, JCL, ...
with any UNICODE?
--
gil
