4 ms·
> The bank didn't have support for diacritical marks. Things like á, è, ô, ü, ç etc. Unless I'm misunderstanding, EBCDIC does have support for all of the chara
by Sophira 5y ago
> The bank didn't have support for diacritical marks. Things like á, è, ô, ü, ç etc.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, EBCDIC does have support for all of the characters used as examples. Specifically, code page 37 - the "default" US EBCDIC code page and one apparently widely used on IBM mainframes[0] - has the characters at 0x45, 0x54, 0xCB, 0xDC, and 0x48 respectively.
(Actually, code page 37 has all characters that are in ISO-8859-1, they're just in different positions.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Page_37 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Page_37
- Smoosh 5y agoYou are correct. I have a mainframe right here in front of me, with a "test card" of all 256 byte values. There certainly are accented characters in most code pages. The problem is that they are difficult to deal with. They cause problems with data entry. They make sorting more complicated. They make searching difficult. etc etc. At my current site names are even stored in uppercase to reduce these issues. I welcome efforts like this to force computers to be more compatible with people - many mainframe systems are stuck in the dark ages of "to hard to be flexible" and need to be kicked into the 21st century.