On Wed, 2 Oct 2013 12:53:57 -0400, Tony Harminc wrote:
>
>Hmmm... A case for UTF-EBCDIC as a vehicle?
>
Hmmm... So I look at the Wikipedia (yes, I know) article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-EBCDIC
which says:
... an encoding based on UTF-8 (known in the specification as UTF-8-Mod)
is applied first. The main difference between this encoding and UTF-8 is
that
it allows unicode code points U+0080 through U+009F (the C1 control
codes) to be represented as a single byte ... each byte is fed through a
reversible (one-to-one) lookup table to produce the final UTF-EBCDIC
encoding. ... similar to IBM-1047 instead of IBM-37 ...
(but with LF mapped to 0x15, presumably an accomodation to the OEMVS311
perversion.)
So this will be of limited use to users dependent on IBM-37, etc.; even
less for users of Russian, Hebrew, Japanese, ... terminals.
Are there terminals adapted to UTF-EBCDIC? Printers? What do you use
UTF-EBCDIC for?
Is there a chicken-and-egg situation: UTF-EBCDIC is little used because
of lack of infrastructure support; the infrastructure hasn't been created
because there's little perceived use? How did UTF-8 surpass this barrier.
Email would be a plausible point of entry. Are there any z/OS or z/VM
mail user agents that translate incoming Unicode messages to UTF-EBCDIC?
We haven't email enabled on our z/OS systems. On z/VM, I notice an
abuse of MIME headers: one message says:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
... yet the content has obviously been translated to some form of EBCDIC
without adjusting the MIMD headers.
-- gil
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