I believe that the distinction is still relevant today. The original use of the term national character was for special characters whose code points mapped to different glyphs in different EBCDIC code pages. Thus "." and "[" would both be special characters, but only "[" would be a national character.
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf of Matt Hogstrom [[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2023 1:48 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: "National" characters I think “Special" is a more accurate term today. For instance, I’ve used them to force some members to the top of a list based on sort order. Matt Hogstrom “It may be cognitive, but, it ain’t intuitive." — Hogstrom > On Jul 11, 2023, at 12:50 PM, Gibney, Dave > <[email protected]> wrote: > > US/Europe centered attitude > $ Currency - Dollar > # Weight - Pound > @ per item - at ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
