On Wednesday, 03/10/2010 at 09:25 EST, Nick Laflamme
<[email protected]> wrote:
> I'd be very tempted to open a PMR and "request" they also respect an
ESCAPE
> character. It's only fair.
>
> But that's a long-term solution, not a short-term solution. :-(
Go ahead and open a PMR. While it is behaving as documented, it is not
behaving in accordance with the system design we put in place a few
releases ago when we changed the default CHARDEL and LINEDEL characters to
OFF in the IBM-provided SYSTEM CONFIG.
A contributing factor to the demise of the remnants of serial line
interactions is that code points 0x7C and 0x4A do not always appear as @
and ¢, respectively. On my terminal, I see @ and Ý, as I use code page
924. In Brazil (cp275), you see à and É.
Finally, try to explain CHARDEL or LINEDEL to anyone coming out of
college. I triple dog dare you. ("You do that WHY?" and "But there's no
CENT sign on the keyboard!") At least LINEND is a familiar concept and has
some practical use as a command delimiter.
On the lighter side, here's a snippet from the code:
* AN '@' SIGN WILL BE TREATED AS A LOGICAL BACKSPACE AND
* A CENT SIGN WILL CANCEL THE TOTAL LINE AND RESULT IN
* A NEW READ TO THE CONSOLE OR CARD READER.
The *card reader*? LOL. I don't recall every having an interactive
session with the card reader. So it must have been a way to save on
punched cards for SA-DDR: INPUT 1111 3350 NO NO WRONG WRONG IGNORE
THIS¢INPUT 111 3390 MYVOL Right. Sure. NOT. You threw it away and
typed a new one. :-)
Alan Altmark
z/VM Development
IBM Endicott
