zArchitecture has PACKA and UNPKA opcodes to pack and unpack decimal. Apart from CVB/CVD ED/EDMK I don't think there's anything that ties zArchitecture to EBCDIC (writing to consoles, HMCs etc. do require the correct character set but that's a different matter). That's why the port of Linux to S/390 wasn't dogged by character set issues.
-----Original Message----- Learn something new (old?) every day. Thank you for that correction. It might be nice to have an ASCII mode added to the architecture that would do useful things for Linux.
