DN> not only portability (which is actually the lesser concern, and I don't 
DN> hold to any "ideal" portability standard that is of little
practical use 
DN> for the platforms I develop for; for example, I blatantly assume ASCII is 
DN> the default 7-bit character set, otherwise I'd waste a lot of time fiddling 
DN> about with character set and data file format issues), but portability to 

Only if you need your data file to be able to be transported between
those two different environments.  If there is no requirement for
this (and there obviously isn't), then you don't have to do very
much work to make sure your program is strictly conforming in that
sense, and is thus portable to EBCDIC machines.  Of course the resultant
data files can only be exchanged between EBCDIC machines, or between
ASCII machines.  So what?  That was never specified as a requirement.
BFN.  Paul.
@EOT:

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