Neither EBCDIC nor ASCII is a very good SBCS, but this is in some considerable measure because no SBCS can be a very good one. 256 code points is not enough.
For the usual reasons, talked about here in other contexts in recent days, the industry has been resistant to adopting DBCSs and MBCSs; but their day is coming, ineluctably. Much of the problem stems from the presence of too many monoglot anglophones, francophones, etc., in the world. They project their provincialities onto the functional specifications of the systems they work on. That said, ASCII poses as many problems in an EBCDIC environment as does EBCDIC in an ASCII one; and both sets of them have been much exaggerated. Chomsky is right that translation is not in general possible; but in this special case it almost always is. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
