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From: crowl@cs.rochester.EDU (Lawrence Crowl)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Compatibility with EBCDIC
Message-ID: <8915@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 20-Aug-87 16:09:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-adm.8915
Posted: Thu Aug 20 16:09:36 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 22-Aug-87 11:30:49 EDT
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In article <997@bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
>I think that for too long language designers have tried to accomodate the
>vagaries of EBCDIC, specifically, that it's a character set with holes.

I think that for too long language designers have tried to accomodate the
vagarities of ASCII.  It has 'Z' < 'a' of all things!  Not only that,
'A' <= z && z <= 'z' allows non-letter characters.  The ISO Latin-n standard
places various modified letters above delete!  Clearly kludgy.

>Must every language accomodate every whim and fancy of every badly-designed
>architecture?  The answer ought to be a resounding no.

I assume this applies to character sets also.  Since you are talking about
EBCDIC, are you implying the 360 architecture was badly designed.  This claim
will need VERY good arguments to over-ride 25 years (almost) of success.

>The general principle is quite simple:  Those who choose to use badly-designed
>machines should have to bear the burden of doing so without dragging the rest
>of us down with them.

Good, lets throw out all those bank accounts stored in EBCDIC.  Lets hunt down
and destroy all those floppies with (gasp) ASCII encoded memos.

>The six-character limit on external names (I hope it's gone from the draft
>now) is another example of not applying this philosophy.  Why does it make any
>sense for the rest of the world have to suffer from the limitations of old
>linkers on old machines from the sixties?

Well, if we just throw out C, a sixties language with many limitations, we have
solved the problem, haven't we?  Throwing out C would also reduce the net
traffic.  After all, we have the programming language of the future waiting for
us, Ada.  (Well, it at least dates from the seventies.)

>We should certainly make an effort to accomodate all widely-used
>architectures, but not at the expense of seriously distorting the language for
>everybody else.

It is the architecture's fault or C's fault that C needs some distorting?
Remember, very few people have to distort Lisp to put it on a new architecture.

-- 
  Lawrence Crowl		716-275-8479	University of Rochester
		     crowl@cs.rochester.arpa	Computer Science Department
 ...!{allegra,decvax,seismo}!rochester!crowl	Rochester, New York,  14627