On Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:08:43 -0400, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) wrote:
>In <listserv%[email protected]>, on 03/18/2010
> at 12:10 PM, Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]> said:
>
>Doesn't z/OS Unix use LF for ASCII files and NL for EBCDIC files? I don't
>believe that there even is a new line character in ASCII, although there
>certainly is in Unicode.
>
Does z/OS Unix support ASCII files, other than by translating them
to EBCDIC?
ISO8859-1 has NEL (NExt Line) at code point 0x85 (to the extent
that ISO8859-1 specifies control characters at all).
CMS pipelines XLATE stage translates:
CP 1047 CP 819
NL<-->NEL
LF<-->LF
z/OS OEMVS311 and iconv(1) translate:
CP 1047 CP 819
NL<-->LF
LF<-->NEL
We discussed this a while ago, at which time you said you believed
that CMS, in this case, DTRT.
The current z/OS behavior is practical for historical reasons, but
formally incorrect. It could be remedied by defining a new code
page, say IBM-1047-2, with LF at 0x15 and NEL at 0x25, preserving
the behavior for compatibility reasons while deprecating future
use in z/OS of IBM-1047 in favor of IBM-1047-2.
But certain pedantic theologians are revolted by this suggestion,
insisting that the code points of EBCDIC control characters are
somehow sacred and not subject to change. Perhaps IBM-1047-2
would no longer have an NL code that performs the historic functiom
on 3215 Selectric Typewriter consoles. I'm not much impressed by
the argument.
-- gil
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