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From: ken@argus.UUCP (Kenneth Ng)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Was the 360 badly-designed?  (was Re: Compatibility with EBCDIC)
Message-ID: <1018@argus.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 27-Aug-87 13:12:57 EDT
Article-I.D.: argus.1018
Posted: Thu Aug 27 13:12:57 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 29-Aug-87 12:33:44 EDT
References: <855@tjalk.cs.vu.nl> <2683@hoptoad.uucp> <916@haddock.ISC.COM> <1044@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Organization: NJ Instit. of Tech: TEIES Project
Lines: 22

In article <1044@bsu-cs.UUCP>, dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
: ASCII was designed quite logically.  It's convenient to have the digits
: begin with a value that has four low-order zero bits, so one can simply
: mask with binary 11110000 and get the numeric value of the digit
: character.

Guess what, this works for EBCDIC as well, so this arguement is moot.

: It's convenient to have the alphabetic characters begin
: with a value that has 0001 as the low-order bits, for one can mask with
: binary 00011111 and get a number representing the position of the
: character in the alphabet.  (E.g., 'Z' & 0x1f gives 26.)  Case
: conversion is equally simple:  A single bit needs to be flipped.

All these 'neat' tricks fall apart when going to international alphabets,
something that IBM has been concerned about for quite some time.  The
360 has an instruction that makes all this stuff real easy, TR(anslate).
This way one can define a table that can be any way you want it to be.

Kenneth Ng: Post office: NJIT - CCCC, Newark New Jersey  07102
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