Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!mcvax!ukc!stc!root44!hamish From: hamish@root.co.uk (Hamish Reid) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Was the 360 badly-designed? (was Re: Compatibility with EBCDIC) Message-ID: <417@root44.co.uk> Date: Tue, 25-Aug-87 08:38:06 EDT Article-I.D.: root44.417 Posted: Tue Aug 25 08:38:06 1987 Date-Received: Fri, 28-Aug-87 00:37:25 EDT References: <855@tjalk.cs.vu.nl> <2683@hoptoad.uucp> <916@haddock.ISC.COM> <1035@bsu-cs.UUCP> <26312@sun.uucp> <1044@bsu-cs.UUCP> Reply-To: hamish@root44.UUCP (Hamish Reid) Organization: Root Computers Ltd, London, England Lines: 46 Summary: Should character sets be an architectural issue? In article <1044@bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes: > > [... much stuff about the 360 series, mostly > already debated/maligned/abused/etc...] > >ASCII was designed quite logically. [ Lots of stuff deleted about bitmasks, contiguous characters, etc ...] >It's hard to defend a character set in >which (x >= 'A' && x <= 'Z') doesn't assure us that x is alphabetic: >this is plainly a very undesirable property of EBCDIC. [...] [As an aside to Rahul: It's even harder to defend a character set that can't cope with very nearly all of the world's languages - what you say might well be true for English, but its not even remotely true or relevant for languages without uppercase/lowercase distinction, or without English sorting sequences, with different alphabets, different characters, etc.... This is plainly a very undesirable property of ASCII. ] Look, I don't want to get into the "My character set is better than yours, nyah nyah" argument, but surely the point is that the character set should either not be an architectural issue at all (i.e. leave the representation and manipulation of human-readable characters to software), or the architecture should be flexible enough to cope with all (or a large number of) character sets (difficult!). There's just too much at stake (sorting, etc) to hard-wire into any architecture a character set so language-(English)-specific as ASCII (or EBCDIC?) - see comp.std.internat if you don't believe me. The 360, (along with several other systems) *does* hardwire in a preference for a specific character set, and this (*not the specific character set itself*) is something you could criticise the 360 for. However, as someone else has pointed out at length, there are more important issues that the 360 could be criticised for than supposed lack of a stack, small segments, use of EBCDIC etc - and that in its day, it was revolutionary. (In a way that the 8086 (to which you compare the 360 on the segment issues) wasn't). Hamish ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hamish Reid Root Computers Ltd, Hayne St, London EC1A 9HH England +44-1-606-7799 hamish@root.co.uk mcvax!ukc!root44!hamish