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From: minow@decvax.UUCP (Martin Minow)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Compatibility with EBCDIC
Message-ID: <136@decvax.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 23-Aug-87 19:50:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: decvax.136
Posted: Sun Aug 23 19:50:09 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 24-Aug-87 03:37:16 EDT
References: <855@tjalk.cs.vu.nl> <2683@hoptoad.uucp> <1519@sol.ARPA> <8452@utzoo.UUCP>
Reply-To: minow@decvax.UUCP (Martin Minow)
Organization: Digital Eq. Corp. - Merrimack NH.
Lines: 31

Several collegues comment on EBCDIC.  Here is my contribution:

1. The main problem with EBCDIC is the lack of a common standard for
   the character semantics.  Several years ago, the ANSI C committee
   distributed at least three incompatible EBCDIC "standards."

2. I don't believe that EBCDIC has been standardized by ANSI -- i.e., its
   contents are under the control of a single manufacturer.  Of course,
   this might be an advantage.  Unfortunately (as noted above), this has
   resulted in unspecified characters being added in different places.

3. I used to think that the fact that the alphabet was discontiguous was
   a problem.  Unfortunately, ISO Latin 1 added two graphic characters
   (multiply and divide) in the middle of the "right-hand" alphabetic
   portion.

4. Some of the strangeness of EBCDIC resulted from its being an evolution
   of an earlier (BCD) standard, and the close connection of both standards
   to punch card codes.

5. Before berating EBCDIC for problems in sorting, it should be noted
   that there is no commonly acceptable standard for character order.
   For example, In Swedish, the letters run a..z, a-ring, a-two_dots,
   o-two_dots; while in Danish, a-ring follows o-two_dots.  Any
   implementation that needs to order text alphabetically must apply
   fairly sophisticated procedures that are both language and country-
   specific.  ANSI C attempts to solve this by adding localization
   macros and the strcoll() function.

Martin Minow
decvax!minow