Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!umich!samsung!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!psuvax1!psuvm!UNC!UPHILG From: UPHILG@UNC.BITNET (Philip Gallagher) Newsgroups: bit.listserv.sas-l Subject: re: Internal collating sequences and character comparisons. Message-ID: Date: 2 Feb 90 14:12:00 GMT Sender: "SAS(r) Discussion" Reply-To: Philip Gallagher Lines: 29 Approved: NETNEWS@PSUVM Gateway Bob Kleckner pointed out very nicely the catastrophes that may occur when running a SAS program developed on a machine that uses the ASCII collating sequence on a machine that uses EBCDIC (or, vice-versa). He gives the example "... the smallest to largest comparison sequence for EBCDIC is a to z < A to Z < 0 to 9 and for ASCII is 0 to 9 < A to Z < a to z . " Since one of my students correctly pointed out my ignorance last semester, I would like to tell you that the EBCDIC collating sequence contains what I choose to consider an oddity that makes me want to say "That EBCDIC collating sequence is even weirder than I realized!". I refer to my version 5 Basics manual, p. 1040: Under CMS, OS, & VSE a portion of the EBCDIC collating sequence is: abcdefghijklmnopq~stuvwxyz{ABCDEFGHI}J KLMNOPQR\STUVWXYZ0123456789 What idiot would have been naive enough to tell a student (without looking it up) that a tilda (~) would not appear in the middle of the small letter sequence and that a right brace (}) and a backslash (\) would not appear in the middle of the capital letter sequence? Unfortunately, I know such an idiot; he was very embarassed when proven to be wrong. "I can't believe that ... ." I suppose I should have realized it; I've used the IBM card/folder with the EBCDIC and ASCII codes on it enough to know about those strange patterns. Anyway, I trust you won't get fooled the way my idiot friend did. Phil Gallagher