Am 31.01.2021 um 15:19 schrieb Paul Gilmartin:
On Sat, 30 Jan 2021 17:35:57 +0100, Bernd Oppolzer wrote:
The problem is not at the client side (ASCII codepages);
the problem is that the EBCDIC codepages in Europe have the
exclamation point (!) at the place, where the American EBCDIC has |,
and so, if you transfer from an European EBCDIC codepage (273, for
example),
which is standard here in Europe, you will get exclamation points
instead of |
on the PC.
I'd expect the other way around: that I'd get '|' where an exclamation
point appears in CP 273.
Maybe this is true, too.
But is there a case where FTP SITE SBDataconn does not suffice
with built-in code pages?
-- gil
Let me try to explain the problem from a German mainframe programmer's
point of view,
who is using European EBCDIC codepages since the early 1980s.
For languages like PL/1 and REXX, who don't have both ! and | as
language elements,
the difference between US EBCDIC and Euro EBCDIC concerning those
characters
is not really a problem; we are accustomed to use ! instead of |, when
programming
PL/1 or REXX ... the concatenation is done using !! in both languages;
when downloading sources to the PC, we also get !! and the German umlauts
and all works well ...
as long as we don't try to run the programs on the PC or to upload the
sources
to a machine which uses US EBCDIC ... then we run into problems.
Then came C (around the early 1990s), and suddenly we were in big trouble,
because both | and ! are part of the language
and { and }, which turned out to be ä and ü in our Euro EBCDIC - the C
sources
looked horrible at our mainframe terminals.
(At that time, we did not use FTP, BTW, to send to sources to the
mainframe;
the tools were IND$FILE or something called workstation agent ... maybe
using
IND$FILE under the cover. You started the editing session on the mainframe,
but then the file was transferred to the PC and a local editing window
on the
PC opened; when saving the file, it was re-transferred to the mainframe.
Big fun :-) ...)
And so we had to translate all our programs (which we prepared and
tested on
the PC) to trigraphs etc., because the early C compilers only supported
US EBCDIC.
Today it is much better, because the C compiler can be controlled to
understand
whatever codepage you want (at a certain point in time, this was true
for the
C compiler, but not for the DB2 preprocessor, so we had to stay with the
trigraph mechanism for C/DB2-programs).
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