Re: CPYFRMSTMF & character conversion

On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 10:22 AM, <dlclark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"MIDRANGE-L" <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote on 02/14/2018
08:58:06 AM:

I know that 66535 means no CCSID conversion, that's basic stuff. An
academic question I've been wondering is, how are standard English
characters in the 1252 CCSID text file readable in the 65535 CCSID
PF on my 37 CCSID system? Wouldn't that require some kind of

conversion?

There is a difference between conversion and translation.

Possibly, but some people are going to use those terms
interchangeably, and some people are going to make a distinction but
still use them in the opposite way (or a different way) than you seem
to think of them. For example:

I'm sure translation to EBCDIC will still take place.

I use the word "translation" to mean translation between languages.
You can translate a word or phrase in English to a word or phrase in
Spanish that more-or-less means the same thing. For the mapping from
one code page to another, I'm more inclined to say "conversion" than
"translation"; but honestly, I think either one is about as bad as the
other. Instead, I try to be extremely, extremely clear about text
versus byte streams, and about encodings.

Text, or characters, are the things that have meaning to human beings.
Text is *encoded* into bytes, or decoded *from* bytes. Proper decoding
of bytes depends on knowing which encoding was used to produce them.

John Y.