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From: guy@rlgvax.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: net.arch
Subject: Re: RE: IBM-ASCII-C-Etc
Message-ID: <1920@rlgvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 14-May-84 04:17:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: rlgvax.1920
Posted: Mon May 14 04:17:07 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 15-May-84 02:59:38 EDT
References: <2587@ncsu.UUCP> <627@ariel.UUCP> <1915@rlgvax.UUCP> <421@clyde.UUCP>
Organization: CCI Office Systems Group, Reston, VA
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> I'm not sure whether this point is clearly understood by the
> participants of net.arch: the USASCII-8 mode bit of the System/360 PSW
> was used ONLY for determining the representation of decimal results.

The point was clearly understood by at least some of us.

> NOTHING else in the hardware architecture makes assumptions about
> character set.  I welcome people to prove me wrong, by mail, and I
> will summarize replies.  I am wearied by statements that "IBM is an
> EBCDIC machine"; it is so, but only for the purposes of the decimal
> (radix=10) instructions.

True, although a lot of translating would have to be done for all the
I/O devices.  However, the question of software compatibility with other
OSes (not a totally irrelevant question, considering Amdahl's UTS runs
under VM along with other OSes) also comes up - character set translations
would have to be done when shipping data between MVS/CMS/etc. and an ASCII
UNIX.  Furthermore, one would need two flavors of C compiler; one for UNIX
and one for the other OSes.

	Guy Harris
	{seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy