[Info-vax] COBOL and EBCDIC tapes Was: AlphaVM-free emulator with all additional peripheral components

[Paul Sture]

On Thu, 02 Aug 2012 12:00:45 +0000, Simon Clubley wrote:

> On 2012-08-01, Paul Sture <paul at sture.ch> wrote:
>> On Wed, 01 Aug 2012 13:34:42 -0500, Bob Koehler wrote:
>>
>>> In article <jvbei8$5qe$1 at dont-email.me>, Stephen Hoffman
>>> <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> writes:
>>>> 
>>>> As was mentioned earlier, there's simply no way to determine the
>>>> character encoding of an arbitrary string.
>>> 
>>>    Which is why I once thought of "encrypting" character data by a
>>>    simple cipher:  store it in EBCDIC.
>>
>> Chuckle.  Another thing COBOL can do easily.  ALPHABET IS EBCDIC was my
>> friend there.
>>
>>
> Which EBCDIC variant would that be ? :-)
> 
> (Fortunately, EBCDIC is now a long distant memory for me. :-))
> 

I should have said VAX/DEC/Compaq/HP COBOL there.  It worked for all the 
IBM tapes I came across but IIRC if push came to shove you could define 
your own alphabet.  You mounted the tapes /FOREIGN and the labels were 
ANSI standard (as documented in the VMS I/O User Guide, so no need to 
reach for IBM documentation).  Retrieving the block and record lengths 
from those headers gave you the necessary information to unpack into RMS 
records.

-- 
Paul Sture