Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!uhccux!munnari.oz.au!cs.mu.oz.au!ok
From: ok@cs.mu.oz.au (Richard O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: need EBCDIC to ASCII function
Message-ID: <2413@munnari.oz.au>
Date: 13 Oct 89 06:09:39 GMT
References: <1060@einstein.misemi> <1989Oct4.203729.11700@utzoo.uucp> <10946@riks.csl.sony.co.jp>
Sender: news@cs.mu.oz.au
Lines: 17

In article <10946@riks.csl.sony.co.jp>, diamond@csl.sony.co.jp (Norman Diamond) writes:
> In fact EBCDIC is just as well-defined as ASCII.

This is not strictly true.  A fairer comparison would be with ISO 646
(the international standard of which ASCII is a local variant), but
even that would be stretching things a bit.

One of the IBM manuals (I think it is the one for 3270 controllers)
has charts for all the national variants of EBCDIC.  There is an
"EBCDIC" for Hebrew, for Russian, with kana, several European versions,
it makes for a very thick manual.

We could say that only the version listed on the /370 reference card is
"real" EBCDIC, but anyone interested in writing software for international
use should at least be aware that the others exist.

And then there's DBCS (in PL/I, the GRAPHIC data type) ...