In a message dated 01-15-99, Mike Ruskai said to Ivan Todoroski about
"Pl/I"

Hi Mike,

 IT> say translate(infile, xrange("A","Z"),
xrange("a","z"))
[snip]

MR>While this works in ASCII and EBCDIC, there's no guarantee that letters
MR>in a code page are assigned in alphabetical order.

Actually, it won't work in EBCDIC.

MR>Simply typing the
MR>alphabet once avoids the potential problem (I'll admit I don't know of
MR>any character set where it is a problem), and it only needs to be typed
MR>once.

This is correct for the issue Murray's code was addressing.

However, XRANGE() does not really limit itself to this. In that regard,
XRANGE() is probably an inappropriate tool to use if portability is
required.

MR>There's also the possibility that while the characters will be in order, 
MR>there will be other non-alpha characters in the middle, that could 
MR>unwittingly be translated incorrectly.

That is the problem with EBCDIC.

MR>Of course, I also never use anything other than || to concatenate in
MR>REXX, because I make what I want to accomplish explicit.

101% correct. ... :-)

Regards

Dave

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 * MR/2 2.25 #353 * Does Microsoft mean "small and limp"?

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