On Sat, 1 Oct 2022 at 13:40, Phil Smith III <[email protected]> wrote: > Jay Maynard wrote: > >OK, so what kind of issues are there with UTF-8? Especially since it's > >pretty much the standard everywhere, these days? > > Yeah, that caught my eye too. I suspect the answer is that *mixing* UTF-8 > and EBCDIC gets complicated because you cannot always convert: e.g., if you > have <Greek character><Cyrillic character> in the same string, UTF-anything > can handle it, but you cannot convert that string to EBCDIC because those > two characters are in different EBCDIC code pages. > > Combine that with UTF-8 normalization and variable-length characters and > it's bewildering for EBCDIC-based minds. > > This does NOT really reflect deficiencies in UTF-8 but rather just > difficulties switching between EBCDIC and UTF-8. > > ISO8859-1 is cleaner (for cases where it's sufficient!) because it CAN map > 1:1 to EBCDIC. Of course it's not sufficient in many, many cases in a > global > economy. >
There *was* something called UTF-EBCDIC, but IBM and UNICODE seem to have abandoned it shortly after it was written. https://unicode.org/reports/tr16/tr16-7.2.html I've never understood why there was so little interest shown in it; it seemed to me to fill the bill very nicely. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
