On 22/02/09 23:20, Charles E. Campbell, Jr. wrote:
> Tony Mechelynck wrote:
>> On 14/02/09 14:28, Spencer Collyer wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, 12 Feb 2009 11:35:10 +0100, Tony Mechelynck wrote:
>>>
>>>> (I don't know how Vim does it on VAX/VMS, which use EBCDIC
>>>> rather than ASCII -- EBCDIC originally went together with Hollerith
>>>> cards).
>>>>
>>> OT I know, but can I just point out that VAX/VMS uses ASCII, not
>>> EBCDIC. At least, none of the VAX/VMS systems (or predecessor PDP
>>> systems) I came across in 15-odd years of using them used EBCDIC :-)
>>>
>>>
>> Maybe I had my wires crossed, but which are the EBCDIC systems on which
>> Vim can run then?
>>
>
> EBCDIC is an old IBM character representation, akin to ASCII. So it
> probably is used on IBM mainframes.
>
> Regards,
> Chip Campbell
EBCDIC is only "akin" to ASCII in the sense that both are character
representations. Otherwise they are very different: for instance, [A-Z]
don't form a continuous sequence in EBCDIC, there are non-alphabetic
characters between I (0xC9) and J (0xD1), and between R (0xD9) and S
(0xE2). The Vim configure script takes advantage of the fact that digits
(0xF0-0xF9) start at decimal 240 in EBCDIC to detect it. (As many of you
know, digits are 0x30-0x39 in ASCII.) Written like that, the configure
test of course says nothing about hardware (which is good, since it's
the portable way to do it).
Didn't know Vim was available on IBM mainframes. Do they run Unix? Hm,
the Wikipedia says that System/390 and z-series computers can run Linux
(usually on virtual machines but compiled to the actual code of the host
processor, not emulated), that they run the same OS under various names,
and that System/390 hardware was a successor of System/360 and /370 --
and IIRC (from the time I worked in COBOL on competitive hardware from
Honeywell-Bull, haha), System/360 used EBCDIC. So maybe IBM "Linux on
System z" (which, I suppose, includes Vim) runs on EBCDIC processors?
Looks like that: the second hit from ":helpgrep EBCDIC" is in
os_390.txt, on a TOC line linking to |zOS-has-ebcdic|. I guess I should
have checked, instead of "guessing" VAX/VMS. I probably should even have
run helpgrep first, rather than checking the WP. BTW that helpfile seems
at least partly out-of-date: it mentions Unix but not Linux. Let's see
if the only email address in that helpfile is still valid. (And BTW, if
+multi_byte is still not available on EBCDIC, I hope for the zOS Linux
guys that someday they will have it.)
Thanks, Dr. Chip, for putting me on the right path to the answer from my
own question. And as a side note: COBOL leads to everything provided
that you get out of it. ;-)
Best regards,
Tony.
--
Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to somebody else -- unless it
is an enemy.
-- Albert Einstein
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