need EBCDIC to ASCII function

Michael Meissner meissner at dg-rtp.dg.com
Sun Oct 15 03:04:18 AEST 1989


In article <10946 at riks.csl.sony.co.jp> diamond at csl.sony.co.jp (Norman
Diamond) writes:

> In article <1989Oct4.203729.11700 at utzoo.uucp> henry at utzoo.uucp
> (Henry Spencer) writes:
>  
>  >You will have to be more specific.  Which flavor of EBCDIC?  EBCDIC is
>  >not a single well-defined character code, but a family of somewhat-similar
>  >codes.  (Which is why the Unix `dd' command has two different conversions,
>  >plus an entry in the BUGS section discussing this problem.)
  
	...

>  In fact EBCDIC is just as well-defined as ASCII.  Only some IBM print
>  trains did not use EBCDIC.  "dd" provides an alternative table so that
>  certain characters will print properly on those printers, but that
>  target code is not EBCDIC.  Also IBM terminals usually did not use
>  EBCDIC, so the operating system had to translate to and from the
>  device codes.

I dunno, the IBM, NCR, SAS, SDRC, and Unisys representives on the ANSI
C committee seemed to bring up the point often enough that there were
regional variations in EBCDIC, just like there are variations in ISO
646 (of which, ASCII is the USA varient).  If anybody would know, it
would be three vendors of computers that use EBCDIC, as well as one
user.

--

Michael Meissner, Data General.				If compiles where much
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