EBCDIC <--> ASCII conversion

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

In article <1990Oct25.140442 at devils.rice.edu>, schafer at devils.rice.edu (Richard A. Schafer) writes:
> In article <MEISSNER.90Oct24150859 at osf.osf.org>, meissner at osf.org
> (Michael Meissner) writes:
> ||> However, unlike say ISO646 or ASCII, there is no one standard
> EBCDIC.
> To be fair, there is no *one* standard ASCII, either

There is one and only one ASCII (well, there was an old version, but
there has been only one for many years).  ASCII stands for
	*AMERICAN* Standard Code for Information Interchange.
ASCII is one particular natiaonal variant of the ISO 646 standard.
The European versions of ISO 646 aren't versions of ASCII.

The new standard (ISO 8859) is a family of 8-bit codes.  Every member
of the family has the same graphic characters in the lower half
(32..126) as ASCII; this is a compatible extension of ISO 646.

If you want to draw a parallel between ISO 646 and EBCDIC, there
are *lots* of versions of EBCDIC.  There's a French one and a Spanish
one and a Hebrew one and ...  Undeniably commendable.  The thing
that people complain about is having several incompatible versions
within the same "locale" (to use an ANSI-C-ism).
-- 
Fear most of all to be in error.	-- Kierkegaard, quoting Socrates.