On Tue, 30 Apr 2019 17:02:13 +0000, Seymour J Metz wrote:
>I recall, e.g., the 129, printing lower case.
>
Google is uninformative on the topic, but your memory is usually
good. I never used anything beyond 029. Had it a caps key, or
was multi-punch necessary?
On Tue, 30 Apr 2019 06:44:05 +0000, Gadi Ben-Avi wrote:
> ...
>The reason goes back a few decades, way before my time.
>In the beginning, when we needed to print Hebrew, the Hebrew characters
>replaced English Upper case. This was before there were even terminals.
>In the next stage, Hebrew Characters replaced the English lower case letters,
>so we could print and display (there were terminals by this stage) both
>English Upper case and Hebrew on the same display or report.
>At this stage someone wrote a huge ISPF application. This is one of the main
>reasons that we still use this encoding.
>The current and up to date encoding (EBCDIC 424) can display and print English
>upper case, English lower case and Hebrew.
>
>In the past, I tried to attempt to convert the ISPF application to EBCDIC-424.
>The problem I encountered was with the &.
>
EBCDIC-424 has '&' at 0x50 (where it's supposed to be) and 'א' at 0x41
(sometimes
NBSP). It would require an expert system to differentiate between '&' and 'א'
if
both occur in the same document.
>The English alphabet has 26 characters, The Hebrew alphabet has 27. Way back
>some decided that The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph, would be
>replaced by the & character (x'50')
>The & is also used as the variable identifier in the CLIST and PANEL
>languages, so it's very hard to know if an & represents the character aleph or
>an &.
>
But resorting to an all-caps code page does nothing to resolve this ambiguity.
Usurping an EBCDIC-invariant code point when so many uncommited code
points existed was inexcusable.
And Timothy omitted mention:
https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/ssw_ibm_i_71/nls/rbagsinvariantcharset.htm
... that:
o EBCDIC code page 290 has Katakana characters at the code points where
lowercase
a through z are in the invariant character set
... sufficient reason for Japanese to eschew lowercase.
>On 4/28/2019 10:43 PM, Gadi Ben-Avi wrote:
>> I found a solution.
>> There is an optional FMID you can download and install called JIF7R16 that
>> adds libraries with upper case only versions of the panels, messages and
>> some other libraries.
-- gil
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