WS> No only is it convenient for ASCII to EBCDIC
WS> conversions; it is even convenient for EBCDIC to EBCDIC
WS> conversions!

-> Why would there need to be a conversion from one system into the same
-> system?

     Assuming that coments one and two are jokes, the third reason
occurred when lowercase letters were added to the character set.  The
hardware was really fast and the character set was non-contiguous, so
why not use the same commands to flip case rather than subtract a range?
(something to do with pack bytes and radixes....)  I grew up in the
middle of D.E.C. country, so I was watching most of this from afar, and
reading it out of books.  I would visit an IBM mainframe from time to
time.  The world of the Hollerith punch deck was...  eh...  strange.

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