C compilers and non-ASCII systems

Sean Conner <spc at conman.org> wrote: If you go back into the mists of time far enough you would find there were many vendors with 6-bit character sets, no two of them EXACTLY alike (and possibly even different ones between different systems from the same vendor, or even different installations). Reading a (1/2 inch magtape) from another system was a painful adventure, starting with "deblocking" the tape (figuring out how many (72 or 80 column) card images were packed into a single tape record), and followed by translating their character set to your local one, and possibly replacing the padding spaces with EOLs. See "IBM libascii functions for z/OS UNIX System Services" http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/zos/features/unix/libascii.html Overview The libascii functions are integrated into the base of the Language Environment. They help you port ASCII-based C applications to the EBCDIC-based z/OS UNIX environment.