On 11 May 2012 08:27, Phil Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > Paul Gilmartin wrote: >>"Different" from what. Everything is different from something else. >>Perhaps different from IBM-1047? > > Doh, yeah, sorry. "It seemed obvious at the time..." - but of course you're > right, it wasn't.
It's perhaps even a little less well defined than that. Not everything on z/OS uses a system-defined codepage, "different" or not. Much of the traditional MVS infrastructure knows nothing of code pages at all. RACF is a good example; you can use the characters $, #, @ in passwords, but there is no codepage support to this, so the mappings are always $=5B, #=7B, @=7C, right off the green card. These are CP 037 and 1047 mappings, but not those for e.g. UK CP 285, which has the Sterling sign (£) at 5B, and the dollar sign at 4A. So typical UK users of 3270s and printers and such have always thought of £ as a valid character in passwords (and assembler language identifiers, dataset names, etc. etc.) No matter until you start to exchange data with other systems. So in the case of our products, where we transfer passwords between systems in various contexts, if e.g. a UK Windows user enters a £ (ASCII, and in this case also UNICODE A3), we must translate it to 5B in EBCDIC, even though there is no notion of CP 285 being in effect in RACF, and no reliable place we can query to find out that we should do this. If the UK company has users in Brazil or the USA, we must translate their $ to 5B instead, and the £ to B1, where it will probably correctly be treated as an error. There's a lot of infrastructure that just ain't there yet. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
