Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!CAMBRIDGE.IBM.COM!pierce
From: pierce@CAMBRIDGE.IBM.COM ("J. Andrew Pierce")
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: X on non-ASCII machines
Message-ID: <100190.090416.pierce@Cambridge.IBM.COM>
Date: 1 Oct 90 13:16:09 GMT
Sender: root@athena.mit.edu (Wizard A. Root)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 18

IBM does in fact have TCP/IP products for both VM and MVS which include
support for X. The way it is handled is that calls to Xlib routines
pass EBCDIC strings, which are converted for the user to ISO Latin-1.
Strings returned from the X server are converted to EBCDIC as well.
It turns out that there are only a limitied number of places where
the conversion needs to be done and a bit of code that could be
portable but was not coded that way (XOpenDisplay, for example, which
uses character constants for client.byteOrder where it could and
should use the actual hex values). There are also some examples in
the Intrinsics where hex values are used where character constants
would be more portable. There are a couple of examples where the
Xlib routines try to be real efficient and write the data directly
from the user data. In these cases, the code uses a buffer to
copy a translated version of the data before writing it.

I'm glad to see the X Consortium considering this!

    Andy Pierce