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From: mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Uninitialized externals and statics
Message-ID: <225800213@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 31 Aug 89 15:27:00 GMT
References: <2128@infmx.UUCP>
Lines: 18
Nf-ID: #R:infmx.UUCP:2128:uxe.cso.uiuc.edu:225800213:000:760
Nf-From: uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!mcdonald    Aug 31 10:27:00 1989


>Incidentally, wishing for a contiguous alphabet will not make IBM (and
>its non-contiguous-alphabet character set, EBCDIC) go away.  That alone
>kills the idea.

No, it won't. But it is easy to avoid: when you specify a computer,
simply specify that a certain character set (i.e. standard 
ASCII characters from 32 to 127) be used for all external and
internal purposes. This will automatically exclude EBCDIC and 
other perversions like CDC's "display code" or radix-50 filenames
(certain PDP-11 OS's). IBM mainframes are a world apart - and destined
for the graveyard of history, albeit very slowly.

Incidentally, I still have not forgiven IBM for the evil thing they
did when going from Model 26 keypunches (BCD) to Model 29 ones
(EBCDIC).

Doug McDonald