Spew - The headline generator

[Bruce Becker]

In article <11239 at polya.Stanford.EDU> kaufman at Polya.Stanford.EDU (Marc T. Kaufman) writes:
|In article <104290004 at hpcvlx.HP.COM> bturner at hpcvlx.HP.COM (Bill Turner) writes:
|>Could you do something to correct the problem that all the verticle bars are
|>missing from the text?  Caused me a hell of a time trying to get the headline
|>file corrected...
|
|Loss of vertical lines is an indication that the file went through an IBM
|mainframe host somewhere.  The | is missing in the EBCDIC character set
|(having been replaced by ']').  A solution to this problem has been known
|since the mid 1960's, but since no big COBOL user has complained, IBM has
|never fixed it.

	Bull-oney.

	"|"  occupies location hex 6A in the EBCDIC
	character set.

	You are thinking of the Solid Vertical Bar,
	location hex 4F in EBCDIC, which is used in
	the concatenation operator in PL/1, as well
	as other places.  It is indeed often mapped
	to "]" in ASCII.

	Just to be maddeningly completist, here are
	the mappings of the other EBCDIC characters
	which don't exist in ASCII:

		Cent Sign (hex 4A) == "["
		Not Sign  (hex 5F) == "^"

Cheers,
-- 
   __	 Bruce Becker	Toronto, Ont.
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