Because there was no standard 8-bit code at the time. IBM did push for an 8-bit ASCII, but it never happened except for a mapping between octets and punch combinations on cards. Had Unicode been around at the time they would probably have jumped at it.
ISO 8859 was a day late and a dollar short. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> on behalf of Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, November 13, 2020 10:26 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Improve OMVS cp performance? On Sat, 14 Nov 2020 11:21:08 +1100, Andrew Rowley wrote: > >I admit I had never looked at the details of FILEDATA=RECORD. It appears >that IBM has taken RFC 4506 and made a small change so their >implementation is incompatible with anything that actually follows the RFC. > Is that: RFC 4506 XDR: External Data Representation Standard May 2006 ??? Which section? >Why would IBM do that? Implementing the RFC format seems reasonable. >Implementing an incompatible variation, less so. > Because they can. Why EBCDIC? -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
