On Wed, 7 Nov 2007 15:42:54 +0900, Timothy Sipples wrote: <snip> > Finally, there is the fact that software engineers -- or at least human > factors engineers -- apparently never reviewed ASCII. As we all know, > EBCDIC puts the letters in the correct numerical order, collating uppercase > and lowercase: AaBbCc.... ASCII doesn't. It's ABCDEF...abcdef.... Thus > decades of dumb ASCII software -- and there's a lot of dumb software in the > world -- has frustrated users everywhere. I was listening to a radio > program this year, and the program's host was complaining bitterly about > the fact his studio database filing system thinks "Jackie" is different > than "jackie." (They couldn't find a prop in their inventory for months.) > Quite possibly as a byproduct of ASCII's strange idea of sorting, UNIX and > UNIX-derived operating systems made perhaps the biggest design mistake of > all time: case sensitivity in commands, file names, and directories. I'd > argue strongly that computing systems should be case retentive but not case > sensitive. Grrrrr....
I am not sure I understand what are you talking about. Both uppercase and lowercase sequences are not contiguous in EBCDIC, and sorting text containing hex numbers in EBCDIC is not a big help. Result of sort command in a member with CAPS OFF (in linux, I can use sort -f or sort --ignore-case to get what you have in your example): EBCDIC Member: ------------------- 000001 a 000002 b 000003 c 000004 d 000005 e 000006 f 000007 g 000008 A 000009 B 000010 C 000011 D 000012 E 000013 F 000014 G ------------------- Unix System Services example: ------------------- > cat x.test a b c d f e A B D C E M F > cat x.test|sort A B C D E F M a b c d e f > cat x.test | sort -f A a B b C c D d E e F f M ------------------- -- Zaromil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
