#ebcdic

ASCII art by Frederick Hammersley, 1969. Made on an IBM-computer (which used EBCDIC and not ASCII encoding), and:

The alphanumeric characters we could ‘draw’ with were: the alphabet, ten numerals and eleven symbols, such as periods, dashes, slashes, etc….

One of the most common headaches when you integrate your IBM i with the outside world is converting data between EBCDIC and ASCII. You get a flat file from a PC, pull JSON from a web service, or process input from another platform and suddenly your strings look like garbage. The good news is that SQLRPGLE gives you clean, efficient ways to handle both directions without any fuss. Here are the…

The Court of Appeal of Brussels has made an interesting ruling. A customer complained that their bank was spelling the customer's name incorrectly. The bank didn't have support for diacritical marks. Things like á, è, ô, ü, ç etc. Those accents are common in many languages. So it was a little surprising that the bank didn't support them. The bank refused to spell their customer's name correctly, so the customer raised a GDPR complaint under Article 16.

“The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller without undue delay the rectification of inaccurate personal data concerning him or her.”

Cue much legal back and forth. The bank argued that they simply couldn't support diacritics due to their technology stack. Here's their argument (in Dutch - my translation follows)

“Bank X also explained that the current customer data management application was launched in 1995 and is still running on a US manufactured mainframe system. This system only supported EBCDIC (“extended binary-coded decimal interchange code”). This is an 8-bit standard for storing letters and punctuation marks, developed in 1963-1964 by IBM for their mainframes and AS/400 computers. The code comes from of the use of punch cards and only contains the following characters…”

(Emphasis added.) EBCDIC is an ancient (and much hated) “standard” which should have been fired into the sun a long time ago. It baffles me that it was still being used in 1995 - let alone today. Look, I'm not a lawyer (sorry mum!) so I've no idea whether this sort of ruling has any impact outside of this specific case. But, a decade after the seminal Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names essay - we shouldn't tolerate these sorts of flaws. Unicode - encoded as UTF-8 - just works. Yes, I'm sure there are some edge-cases. But if you can't properly store human names in their native language, you're opening yourself up to a lawsuit. Source GDPRhub - 2019/AR/1006

The Court of Appeal of Brussels held that, in accordance with Article 16 GDPR, the data subject has the right for their name to be correctly spelled when processed by the computer systems of the Bank. To claim in 2019 that adapting a computer system to correctly handle diacritics would cost several months of work and/or constitute additional costs for the Bank, does not allow the Bank to disregard the rights of the data subject. A correctly functioning banking institution may be expected to have computing systems that meet current standards, including the right to correct spelling of people's names.

(decided on September 10th, 2019)

Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC)is an eight-bit character encoding used mainly on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computer operating systems. It descended from the code used with punched cards and the corresponding six-bit binary-coded decimal code used with most of IBM's computer peripherals of the late 1950s and early 1960s. [...] While IBM was a chief proponent of the ASCII standardization committee,[4] the company did not have time to prepare ASCII peripherals (such as card punch machines) to ship with its System/360 computers, so the company settled on EBCDIC.

Learn (more) about how to work with ASCII and EBCDIC on z/OS

Photo by Author TL;DR : go to the summary at the end of the post. One of the strengths of z/OS is that it supports traditional and modern applications, programming languages, and even data simultaneously. I can code in assembler, C, COBOL, Java, Python, Node.js or Golang on z/OS. With this strength comes some complexity, especially around the way your files are encoded. There are many ways to…

An invalid transformation of a COBOL data description entry

Here’s a subtle gotcha that we saw recently.  A miraculous tool transformed some putrid DELTA generated COBOL code from GOTO soup into human readable form.  Among the transformations that this tool did, were modifications to working storage data declarations (removing unused variables in the source, and simplifying some others).  One of those transformations was problematic.  In that problematic…