Re: z/OS and code pages

[Tony Harminc]

On 14 September 2016 at 14:53, Paul Gilmartin
<000433f07816-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu> wrote:
>>But Katakana shares the same hex values as lower case English letters. I have 
>>always had upper case User IDs and passwords. Perhaps it is a RACF 
>>restriction?
>>
> What technical concern (I presume there was one) motivated EBCDIC's
> usurping the Latin minuscule code points for non-Latin characters, rather
> than first employing the code points left uncommitted in the s360 Principles
> as the ISO8859-x family did?

Memory, or rather, lack thereof, presumably in the 3277 terminal and
its control unit. Plus IBM's famous early indifference to non-US
character requirements. Each country/region got a locally designed
(maybe even locally implemented, at first?) character set (glyph) ROM
and mapping table for the characters thought to be needed. Since the
3277 did not display lower case Latin letters anyway, it probably
seemed reasonable to use those positions for the fairly large Katakana
set. Perhaps keyboard mapping also contributed. If there existed
typewriters with both Latin and Katakana, that keystroke mapping with
the ability to lock the keyboard into one or the other mode would be
someting to be preserved.

Tony H.

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Re: z/OS and code pages

[Paul Gilmartin]

On Wed, 14 Sep 2016 07:34:23 -0400, Cameron Conacher wrote:
>
>But Katakana shares the same hex values as lower case English letters. I have 
>always had upper case User IDs and passwords. Perhaps it is a RACF restriction?
> 
What technical concern (I presume there was one) motivated EBCDIC's
usurping the Latin minuscule code points for non-Latin characters, rather
than first employing the code points left uncommitted in the s360 Principles
as the ISO8859-x family did?

-- gil

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Re: z/OS and code pages

[retired mainframer]

User IDs have always been restricted to upper case (at least as far back as
UADS).  RACF has supported upper and lower case password characters as an
option for many years now.

> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
> Behalf Of Cameron Conacher
> Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2016 4:34 AM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: Re: z/OS and code pages
> 
> I honestly don't know.
> But Katakana shares the same hex values as lower case English letters. I
have always had
> upper case User IDs and passwords. Perhaps it is a RACF restriction?

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Re: z/OS and code pages

[Cameron Conacher]

I honestly don't know. 
But Katakana shares the same hex values as lower case English letters. I have 
always had upper case User IDs and passwords. Perhaps it is a RACF restriction?

Sent from my iPhone

> On Sep 13, 2016, at 8:47 PM, Charles Mills <charl...@mcn.org> wrote:
> 
> Sure, but does z/OS tolerate it? Can you use Katakana characters in passwords 
> and userids?
> 
> Charles
> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On 
> Behalf Of Cameron Conacher
> Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2016 4:56 PM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: Re: z/OS and code pages
> 
> EBCDIC code page 930 supports Japanese kanji and single byte katakana
> 
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Re: z/OS and code pages

[Paul Gilmartin]

On 2016-09-13 17:47, Charles Mills wrote:
> 
> z/OS Unicode Services is all about code pages and so forth. The C compiler I 
> think has some varying code page support. z/OS FTP supports code page 
> specification. 
> 
> How about USS? Where is @Gil when you need him?
> 
Sounds kinda like "Where's a cop when you need one?"

ISPF  3.17, like Samuel Johnson's politically incorrect dog, does
surprisingly well within the limits of the terminal code page.

Attaching a .pax which LISTSERV will discard, but you might get it
offlist.  Extract it on a desktop and view the members with a capable
editor such as TextWrangler, gedit, or notepad++.

(LISTSERV entirely rejected it.)

Now extract it on z/OS 2.2 being sure to preserve the extended attributes.
It should look like:

user@OS/390.25.00: ls -alTHE pages
total 96
drwxr-xr-x  2 User Group   8192 Sep 13 
19:07 .
drwxr-xr-x 29 User Group   8192 Sep 13 
19:07 ..
t UTF-8   T=on  -rw-r--r--  --s- lf 1 User Group   1434 Sep 13 
19:05 from_IBM-037
t UTF-8   T=on  -rw-r--r--  --s- lf 1 User Group   1435 Sep 13 
19:05 from_IBM-1047
t UTF-8   T=on  -rw-r--r--  --s- lf 1 User Group   1437 Sep 13 
19:05 from_IBM-1154
t UTF-8   T=on  -rw-r--r--  --s- lf 1 User Group   1434 Sep 13 
19:05 from_IBM-500
t UTF-8   T=on  -rw-r--r--  --s- lf 1 User Group   1436 Sep 13 
19:04 from_ISO8859-1
t UTF-8   T=on  -rw-r--r--  --s- lf 1 User Group   1437 Sep 13 
19:05 from_ISO8859-5
- untaggedT=off -rw-r--r--  --s-    1 User Group   1340 Sep 13 
19:05 raw_ASCII
- untaggedT=off -rw-r--r--  --s-    1 User Group   1339 Sep 13 
19:05 raw_EBCDIC

The payload is UTF-8; ISPF 3.17 should show all the characters your
terminal supports.  If you can switch your terminal to a different
code page, try that.  (xterm may have an option for 1154.)

-- gil

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Re: z/OS and code pages

[Charles Mills]

Sure, but does z/OS tolerate it? Can you use Katakana characters in passwords 
and userids?

Charles
-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Cameron Conacher
Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2016 4:56 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: z/OS and code pages

EBCDIC code page 930 supports Japanese kanji and single byte katakana

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Re: z/OS and code pages

[Cameron Conacher]

EBCDIC code page 930 supports Japanese kanji and single byte katakana

Sent from my iPhone

> On Sep 13, 2016, at 7:47 PM, Charles Mills <charl...@mcn.org> wrote:
> 
> Isn't there some Japanese code page (Katakana) support in z/OS?
> 
> Some z/OS fields will take any bit value -- for example, the JOB statement 
> Programmer Name field. For reasons unnecessary to this thread I have gone 
> into Hex mode in ISPF and stored various unprintable values there, and 
> everything works just fine. They show up in SMF 30 as entered. So you could 
> put Étienne there.
> 
> You *might* be able to have ÉTIENNE as your RACF name (not userid, name) -- I 
> have not tried.
> 
> z/OS DB2 -- I know, not what you asked -- has I believe excellent and full 
> code page support including Unicode.
> 
> z/OS Unicode Services is all about code pages and so forth. The C compiler I 
> think has some varying code page support. z/OS FTP supports code page 
> specification. 
> 
> How about USS? Where is @Gil when you need him?
> 
> Charles
> 
> -Original Message-
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On 
> Behalf Of Tony Harminc
> Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2016 4:20 PM
> To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> Subject: Re: z/OS and code pages
> 
>> On 13 September 2016 at 19:09, zMan <zedgarhoo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> This is probably a dumb question, but that's never stopped me before:
> 
> :-)
> 
>> If my name were "*Étienne*", would I be able to have that as a TSO userid?
> 
> No.
> 
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Re: z/OS and code pages

[Charles Mills]

Isn't there some Japanese code page (Katakana) support in z/OS?

Some z/OS fields will take any bit value -- for example, the JOB statement 
Programmer Name field. For reasons unnecessary to this thread I have gone into 
Hex mode in ISPF and stored various unprintable values there, and everything 
works just fine. They show up in SMF 30 as entered. So you could put Étienne 
there.

You *might* be able to have ÉTIENNE as your RACF name (not userid, name) -- I 
have not tried.

z/OS DB2 -- I know, not what you asked -- has I believe excellent and full code 
page support including Unicode.

z/OS Unicode Services is all about code pages and so forth. The C compiler I 
think has some varying code page support. z/OS FTP supports code page 
specification. 

How about USS? Where is @Gil when you need him?

Charles

-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf 
Of Tony Harminc
Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2016 4:20 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: z/OS and code pages

On 13 September 2016 at 19:09, zMan <zedgarhoo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> This is probably a dumb question, but that's never stopped me before:

:-)

> If my name were "*Étienne*", would I be able to have that as a TSO userid?

No.

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Re: z/OS and code pages

[Tony Harminc]

On 13 September 2016 at 19:09, zMan  wrote:
> This is probably a dumb question, but that's never stopped me before:

:-)

> If my name were "*Étienne*", would I be able to have that as a TSO userid?

No.

> Or would I have to suffer through just "*Etienne*", sans accent aigu?

Yes. Or of course some other id entirely, since there is nothing in
place to reliably translate Étienne into Etienne if you are sending
userids between other systems (e.g. Windows) that do support "fancier"
characters, and z/OS.

> Does the MVS side of z/OS "do" code pages in any meaningful way? I don't
> mean in DB2 or some other application. I think I read that WTO really only
> does code page 037, which suggests that the answer is "no".

No, not really. RACF, in particular, effectively supports a small
subset of CP 037 only. There are specific and quite restrictive rules
for what byte values are allowed in userids, passwords, and password
phrases. (I say byte values rather then characters, because RACF
specifies the allowed characters this way, rather than in terms of
e.g. Unicode u+ or IBM GCGIDs.) There are also implicit
restrictions on other fields such as the user name. While an
authorized application program may well be able to write unsupported
byte values into the database, there is no real support in the RACF
commands for them, and results may get strange if you write an app
that does this.

> Any pointers to doc welcome; of course "z/os" and "code page" (or
> "codepage") gets a zillion hits, too many to be particularly useful.

The doc updates for RACF APAR OA43999 (in the z/OS 2.2 base doc) do
contain the allowable characters in passwords, and their hex values.
But I don't think there is really much, since z/OS, as you say,
doesn't really support code pages.

Tony H.

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