On Thursday, 09/17/2020 at 01:04 GMT, Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2020-09-16, at 23:14:40, Alan Altmark wrote: > > ... > > I've been trying to stamp out non-standard code pages since the late 1990s > > when I did Euro enablement for VM TCP/IP. That's when I added nearly 200 > > EBCDIC-ASCII translation tables (TCPXLATE/TCPXLBIN files). > > > There's something very wrong here. Excess complexity is > not repaired by adding complexity. (Homeopaty? "We have > too many code pages, so lets add more code pages.") > > The answer is UNICODE.
There's nothing "wrong". It may not be the way you or I would have done it if people, money and time were in infinite supply, but it didn't (and still doesn't) affect the end user, who still must tell FTP (for example) what code pages to use on the host side and the remote side. It wasn't worth going into every application and changing how it did translation. They were already coded to load a specified (or default) translation table. I didn't have to figure out the translations, I just had to write a program to re-encode the IBM-standard translation tables into TCPXLATE files. I wouldn't do anything with Unicode on z/VM unless I could get a) the file system to store an attribute that indicates the file is in Unicode format, and b) 3270 data stream support for Unicode c) XEDIT and BROWSE support for (b) At the end of the day, I want to transmit the files in binary and I want to be able to XEDIT them as though they were text. Otherwise, what's the point? BTW, I added translation tables to get the traditional EBCDIC code pages and their Euro-enabled counterparts converted to/from some other EBCDIC code pages (notably 500), ISO 8859-1 (819), ISO 8859-15 (923), Western Windows (1252), and OS/2 (850) ASCII. And I do custom translation tables on request. Building translation tables was easy because they were supplied by IBM's Globalization team. I just had to convert them to TCPXLATE files. Alan Altmark Senior Managing z/VM and Linux Consultant IBM Systems Lab Services IBM Z Delivery Practice ibm.com/systems/services/labservices office: 607.429.3323 mobile; 607.321.7556 [email protected] IBM Endicott
