On 18 January 2013 11:17, Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hmmm... > > ...[O]n September 23, 1999, communication with the [Mars Climate Orbiter] > was lost as the spacecraft went into orbital insertion, due to ground > based computer software which produced output in Imperial units of > pound-seconds (lbf×s) instead of the metric units of newton-seconds (N×s) > specified in the contract between NASA and Lockheed. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter cites: > ftp://ftp.hq.nasa.gov/pub/pao/reports/1999/MCO_report.pdf Or, since it's Friday and almost 30 years later, the Gimli Glider: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider > Likewise, any protocol that quietly translates "$" to "£" might lead to > some very expensive mistakes in business transactions. I suspect lawyers > prudently insist on "U.S. dollars" and "U.K. pounds. I am continually amazed to see contracts that specify amounts in figures preceded by (what they think is) a dollar sign. Wikipedia lists 36 currencies that use that sign; I suppose lawyers don't tend to get burned more than once by that one. But slightly more on topic, there are several contexts in which z/OS-based software that predates the notion of code pages uses absolute byte values rather than notional characters; as well as dataset names, userids and passwords in RACF jump out. In our password synchronization products we must take care that we translate the ASCII or Unicode dollar sign from (say) a UK Windows user's keyboard into a UK EBCDIC dollar sign on z/OS code page 285 (x'4B'), and the pound sterling sign into what would be the EBCDIC dollar sign (x'5B') in code page 037. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
