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

[Bruce Vining <bvining@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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