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Exaggerated.Exaggerated.Posted Feb 25, 2007 12:09 UTC (Sun) by eru (subscriber, #2753)In reply to: Exaggerated. by AJWM Parent article: How an Accident of Hardware Design Encouraged Open Source (O'ReillyNet) It had everything to do with the fact that the IBM used EBCDIC as its native character set, which among its other faults, is non-contiguous in its alphabetic sequences. That's what makes text manipulation such a pain in the butt on those systems. An anglo-centric view. For most other languages, alphabetic sequences are non-contiguous in all widely used character sets.
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Exaggerated. Posted Feb 26, 2007 23:17 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link] Well, perhaps today, but put it in context. In the relevant era (1970s in this case), when you're comparing EBCDIC vs. ASCII, character classification is quite a bit easier in ASCII than in EBCDIC. EBCDIC might not have been so bad to work with on BCD-centric hardware, but on machines that only focused on 2s complement, I can see it causing some heartburn in some cases.
In the modern day, obviously the debate's moot in the presence of Unicode, UTF-8, etc., and plenty of MIPS, RAM and disk to go around (as compared to the 1970s)....
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