This may be old hat to many/most here. But I found it quite interesting. And perhaps more important now that IBM is emphasizing z/OS in the "mobile" world.
http://reedbeta.com/blog/programmers-intro-to-unicode/ IMO, something that IBM languages could find really useful is Google Go's concept of a "rune". A "rune" is what Go uses instead of the longer "UNICODE Code Point". It is basically the _concept_ of a "letter" without any specific bit encoding. E.g. U+0061 is "LOWER CASE LATIN LETTER A". But U+0061 is NOT 0x61 (UTF-8) or 0x0061 (UTF-16BE) or 0x6100 (UTF-16LE). Unfortunately the language COBOL only has a PIC X. Which is "one 8 bit byte". There's not even a _concept_ of a UNICODE Code Point in COBOL. And, honestly, I don't really see how to implement such in COBOL, unless they just do the "easy" thing and use UTF-32. Which really "wastes" bytes in memory and on disk. Uh, unless your DASD array does some sort of transparent compression on the back end. -- Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless. -- Sinclair Lewis Maranatha! <>< John McKown ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
