On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 11:00:11 -0400, John Gilmore wrote: >IBM has long had the habit of jacking up acronyms to put new >interpretations under them. The impetus has usually been to replace >the notionally too particular and limiting with something more generic >and innocuous for marketing reasons. Thus, > >structured programming facility ==> system productivity facility. > >This practice is perhaps a sin against good language: it dilutes >precision; but it does not strike me as reprehensible. IBM's concern >to protect its sometimes considerable investments in existing acronyms >is entirely understandable. > Primarily the investment in documentation. In the earliest times of the s360, "character" was used to mean an 8-bit datum; "byte" was rare. (Internet documentation uses "octet" because neither "character" nor "byte" has a uniform meaning throughout the area of supported platforms.) This usage is obsolete since the advent of DBCS.
What to do? Declare that from now on, "byte" means an 8-bit datum and "character" means an encoding of whatever length of a displayable glyph, and change all documentation to conform? Make the Humpty- Dumptyesque statement somewhere in a glossary that "character" means 8-bit datum except where clearly qualified as "DBCS character", or "MBCS character", or "UTF-8" character, etc.? Ouch! Either way. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
