4 ms·
Well ... I hate to advertise our technical debt but we've got a couple of mainframes that store every character string in upper case because no one has bothered
by smoyer 12y ago
Well ... I hate to advertise our technical debt but we've got a couple of mainframes that store every character string in upper case because no one has bothered to convert from the original EBCDIC [1] ... THIS IS REALLY GOING TO BOTHER ME!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC
- alwold 12y agoIt looks like EBCDIC supports lower case letters just fine. Any idea why they used all uppercase? I've noticed use of all uppercase on a lot of old systems, and always sort of wondered why. Is there a good technical reason? Maybe a data type that uses less space per letter?
- ams6110 12y agoOlder line printers and early teletypes didn't have lower case.
- Someone 12y agoEBCDIC has lowercase because it is _Extended_. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCD_(6-bit) http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCD_(6-bit): "BCD ("Binary-Coded Decimal"), also called alphanumeric BCD, alphameric BCD, BCD Interchange Code, or BCDIC, is a family of representations of numerals, uppercase Latin letters, and some special and control characters as six-bit character codes. [...] IBM later created the 8-bit code EBCDIC (Extended Binary-coded Decimal Interchange Code) based on BCD."