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Postings from April 2010
The answer to my question about what does \cX mean on EBCDIC platforms was there all along in perlebcdic.pod. I have looked at that many times, but not noticed that it has a complete table of the control characters in ASCII and all 3 EBCDIC code pages known by Perl 5. I am surprised though that they didn't use the standard acronyms for these. For example, it gives <S.O. HEADING>, where the standard is <SOH>. I'm tempted to change them to use the standard, as I'm thinking about adding the standard acronyms in a new construct so that one can specify control characters in a platform-independent way. I'm wondering if the standard acronyms have fallen into disuse, and it's only because I'm so old that that they seem like second nature to me. The table doesn't specify what the C1 controls are, but says things like <C1 0> for the control specified by Latin1 128, <C1 1> for Latin1 129, etc. There are standard names and acronyms for these as well, but I'm wondering if they don't necessarily have the same meaning in EBCDIC code pages, and the authors of the pod didn't know what they should be. Or perhaps they were in a hurry and didn't want to look them up. Any enlightenment on these issues would be appreciated.