On Mon, 23 Sep 2013 21:23:04 -0400, Tony Harminc wrote:
>
>> Not as obscure as it deserves to be.
>
>Never miss a chance on this one, do you Gil... As you know, I think
>UTF-EBCDIC was a great idea, and can't understand how it failed to
>catch on. Maybe there's just not much call for invoking legacy
>interfaces on the IBM zArch OSs with new data. Or perhaps UNIX
>programmers are lazier. Or something...
>
OK. I was shooting from the hip. Hmmm:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-EBCDIC
o ... Its advantages for existing EBCDIC-based systems are similar to
UTF-8's advantages for existing ASCII-based systems.
IOW, all control characters and metacharacters for most programming
languages are encoded as themselves. This makes it friendly to
those programming languages, and to transmission over (EBCDIC)
networks.
o ... the UTF-8-Mod encoding of codepoints above U+009F is generally
larger than the UTF-8 encoding.
Somewhat a disadvantage.
o (not mentioned) A simple byte-by-byte lexical sort doesn't
sort into UNICODE code point order (but I'm guessing). This
may not be very important.
o ..., so each byte is fed through a reversible (one-to-one) lookup
table to produce the final UTF-EBCDIC encoding.
It doesn't say (but perhaps TR # 16 does) which EBCDIC code page
(or for that matter, which flavor of ASCII -- ISO8859-??) is used.
This could be chaotic. And the dreadful LF<->NEL pitfall lurks.
ASCII suffers similar problems; else why would we have the dreadful
trigraphs in ANSI C?
What should UTF-EBCDIC be used for? Web servers? Still
would require a tedious UTF-EBCDIC to UTF-8 (the modal practice)
Better simply to work in ASCII/UTF-8. That's what the z/OS C
compiler Enhanced ASCII support is for (but is that much used?)
And I see:
user@HOST: iconv -l | grep UTF
1208 UTF-8
... no UTF-EBCDIC. Similarly with UTF-EBCDIC. Cause and effect?
Does LE not support UTF-EBCDIC because of lack of demand, or
does UTF-EBCDIC languish because of lack of LE support?
-- gil
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