Topic drift ...

I was referring to binary fields in application data files, and I don't
*think* UTF-16 endianness addresses this. (Correct me if I am wrong!) It
just addresses the endianness of the UTF-16 "binary halfword" character
format.

Charles


-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List [mailto:[email protected]]
On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin
Sent: Thursday, November 2, 2017 3:04 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: ASCII self-defining constants

On 2017-11-02, at 15:38:43, Charles Mills wrote:

> Yep. Unless you want to make this requirement muy complicated you have to
say "all or nothing -- take it or leave it" I used to be in the mainframe-PC
file transfer software business. "Transform" is a whole product/problem area
of its own. If you are going to be cognizant of binary fields, then the next
subject to come up is endian-ness.
>  
UTF-16 addresses this with the BOM.  I suppose.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Of Dave Rivers
> Sent: Thursday, November 2, 2017 2:10 PM
> 
> The problem - I think - is mixed text/binary data in the single file.
> 
> You want the text translated, and not the binary; so translation at the
file level isn't always the right answer.
>  
Why would any sane programmer (assuming such exist) put binary data in
compiler (assembler source)!?

> Even for HLASM input. we have this very problem in our cross-assembler.  
>  
I suspect the DASM programmer with anything like CP819 on a desktop who
codes either "DC CA'['" or "DC X'5B'" gets the same result for each.  And I
consider neither to be "binary", and I expect neither DASM, nor HLASM, to
exempt the characters in the coded hex constant from input translation.
"All or nothing."  CP1047 is the outlier here.

-- gil

Reply via email to