Re: Codepages: Does anybody have any idea why . . .

A very good book discussing this is Coded Character Sets: History and
Development by Charles Mackenzie. The book is part of IBMs Systems
Programming Series from way back when.

The book is however thirty years old, so don't expect too much on more
recent standards :)



On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 11:21 AM, Bruce Vining <bvining@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

IBM did not create all of the various EBCDIC code pages in isolation. The
code pages were designed by various work/study groups. Within each group
were representatives of IBM, government bodies associated with the
specific language, and other interested parties.

Politics, in the 60s and still today, have a lot to do with how standards
are defined. Unicode for instance has been strongly influenced by government
requirements. Standards don't become "real" standards if nations refuse to
use/allow them...

On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 10:26 AM, James H. H. Lampert <
jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Does anybody know why it is that IBM came up with a whole bunch of
EBCDIC codepages that are really just permutations of the same characters?

I mean, I can understand Turkish having its own codepage, given that it
has a few extra letters not appearing in any of the regular European
codepages, and I can understand languages that don't use the Roman
alphabet at all having their own codepages, but . . .

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JHHL
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Regards,
Bruce
www.brucevining.com
www.powercl.com