If the charset doesn't allow case folding by OC to spaces, I don't want to use 
it. 馃槉

-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List <[email protected]> On Behalf 
Of Seymour J Metz
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2025 11:15 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Is HLASM efficient WAS: Telum and SpyreWAS: Vector instruction 
performance

26? 52? That's very Anglocentric. Why not any alphabetic Unicode character? 
EBCDIC was great in its day, but these days 256 code points is not nearly 
enough.

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3
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________________________________________
From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List <[email protected]> on behalf 
of Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2025 12:10 PM
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Is HLASM efficient WAS: Telum and SpyreWAS: Vector instruction 
performance


External Message: Use Caution


On 8/25/25 20:33, Jon Perryman wrote:
> Ask yourself, why are unix commands so strange (e.g. testcmd -x -v -f aaa -u 
> mmm -t bbb ccc -u). Why is uppercase/lowercase important to Unix? It's 
> because of C limitations. In C, you strchr('-') or strchr(' '). Since you 
> can't search for 2 different characters, you must structure the command in a 
> known easily parsed syntax.
>     ...
Most UNIX facilities support search for 2 (or more) different
characters, often by [list].

> Searching and parsing is stunningly fast using 1 z instruction. So how does 
> TSO parse commands such as:
>
> TSO ALloc DDN(abc) PATH('/u/user') DISP(NEW) catalog SPACE(1,1)
>
> You can't uppercase the command because of PATH requires lowercase. You use 
> TRT CMD,TRT_TABLE where TRT_TABLE are the characters that represent parsing 
> points.
>    ...
     "Doctor, it hurts when I uppercase the command."
     "Don't do that."

Many mainframe conventions arose from an attemptto
accommodate programmer habits formed by the limitations
of the 026 (no longer marketed by IBM,AFAIK),
aggravated by the 3277 which, unforgivably, transmitted
minuscule while it displayed majuscule.

Don't uppercase the command; uppercase the keyword at
the point of symbol lookup.  Similarly, uppercase the
argument of DSN; leave the argument of PATH, SEND, ...
as is.

Outgrow your 026 mindset.  Think of 52 different characters,
not two typographic variants of 26 characters.

But IBM could do better.  It lacks common extensions such as:
     find -iname
     OptionL case-sensitive regex for DFSORt
     ...

--
gil




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