[Info-vax] C limitations, was: Re: VMS process communication

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 4/16/2023 7:55 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> On 2023-04-13 14:16, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> On 2023-04-12, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
>>>
>>> but I'd say that is less common, and a bad programmer will always manage
>>> to write bad code, no matter what language. That don't mean the language
>>> is bad. It is just more unclear, and in C there is no performance
>>> reason, or anything else giving any reason why you would write 48, when
>>> '0' is so much clearer what the intent is. And then it also works if you
>>> use another character set, as long as all the digits have consecutive
>>> code points.
>>>
>>
>> I wonder how the EDCDIC people handle this and your other examples ? :-)
>>
>> (A-Z is not a contiguous unbroken sequence in EBCDIC.)
> 
> I know. EBCDIC was despised by most back in the 80s for a reason...
> Anyway, my examples were dealing with digits, which do have the property 
> of being a contiguous unbroken sequence even in EBCDIC...
> 
> But in general, EBCDIC will require that people do much more coding that 
> is very character set aware for some problems. Miserable in general.

There are two types of issues:
* issues due to developer not knowing EBCDIC well enough
* issues due to nature of EBCDIC

The first is a very general phenomenon.

The second cover issues like a-z and A-Z not being
consecutive.

But there are also positives.

The conversion of numbers between EBCDIC text and
zoned BCD is damn fast!

:-)

Arne