I believe that the distinction is still relevant today. The original use of the term national character was for special characters whose code points mapped to different glyphs in different EBCDIC code pages. Thus "." and "[" would both be special characters, but only "[" would be a national character.
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Matt Hogstrom [m...@hogstrom.org] Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2023 1:48 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: "National" characters I think “Special" is a more accurate term today. For instance, I’ve used them to force some members to the top of a list based on sort order. Matt Hogstrom “It may be cognitive, but, it ain’t intuitive." — Hogstrom > On Jul 11, 2023, at 12:50 PM, Gibney, Dave > <000003b5261cfd78-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu> wrote: > > US/Europe centered attitude > $ Currency - Dollar > # Weight - Pound > @ per item - at ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
