On 1/9/2012 11:17 AM, Paul Gilmartin wrote:
On Jan 9, 2012, at 10:17, John Gilmore wrote:
o 'ffl', 'fi' and the like are typesetters' ligatures, usually found
only in 'expert' fonts and not having their own code points, probably
because needs for them vary from font to font.
Yes. The needs were mechanical because of contention between
type slugs. I was surprised to learn, circa 1987, that MS Word
of that era required the author to specify those ligatures
rather than making it a function of the rendering filter. I
don't know if it's better now. I suspect that few word processors
were ever coupled to mechanical typesetters; the IBM Selectric
might have been kind of an exception.
As I have had occasion to note before, we have good zArchitecture,
z/OS and HLASM support for UNICODE availablegto us; and it is time we
all started using it, at least in new undertakings.
How well do zArchitecture, z/OS and HLASM support UTF-8, which
is the norm in various quarters? I suppose that can be
considered another output filter: UCS-16<-> UTF-8.
z/OS? Can I write my JCL and utility control statements
in Unicode?
HLASM? Can I write my assembler source in Unicode?
Well, you know he was referring to Unicode System Services (oh no)
and the hardware Unicode instructions.
We won't get to my favorite pipedream - u/OS, where all
native strings are UTF-32 - in my lifetime, and probably
never. But it would be cool and after a "brief period of
adjustment" would solve all those nasty code page issues.
I know you hate EBCDIC. How do you feel about, say, JIS?
Accidents of history. While the normal code set for text on
the PDP-6 was 7-bit ASCII, most system calls required arguments
in 6-bit ASCII subset. z/OS is in a similar position with
respect to Unicode versus EBCDIC.
-- gil
--
Kind regards,
-Steve Comstock
The Trainer's Friend, Inc.
303-355-2752
http://www.trainersfriend.com
* To get a good Return on your Investment, first make an investment!
+ Training your people is an excellent investment
* Try our tool for calculating your Return On Investment
for training dollars at
http://www.trainersfriend.com/ROI/roi.html
