[Info-vax] AlphaVM-free emulator with all additional peripheral components

[Bob Koehler]

In article <seqe9-3b5.ln1 at news1.chingola.ch>, Paul Sture <paul at sture.ch> writes:
> 
> "The collating sequence of lower case alphabetic characters is higher 
> than upper case and numerics are higher still — the exact opposite of 
> ASCII."
> 
> The collating sequence got me at one stage.  I was wondering if we had 
> enough disk space to sort a very large input file into ASCII sequence, 
> then it occurred to me to do two passes up the file outputting the 
> numerics first.

   Since A .lt. B depends on the charaacter set, Fortran added functions 
   to compare characters according to the ASCII collating sequence quite 
   a while ago.

   All the ASCII based systems I had access to since then support the
   new functions.  I haven't had to look at IBM's Fortran in decades,
   but the last time I did that part of the Fortran standard was 
   documented by IBM as unsupported on thier EBCDIC based mainframes.
   
   So the one place you really needed them, you got to roll your own.