Do any IBM products have UTF-EBCDIC as a supported configuration option? Does anyone use it?
Oracle RDBMS supports "UTFE" on EBCDIC platforms, which is to UTF-EBCDIC what CESU-8 is to UTF-8 – i.e. UTF-EBCDIC but with codepoints outside the BMP encoded using surrogates. Over the last couple of decades, the only EBCDIC platforms Oracle RDBMS has been supported on have been z/OS and BS2000/OSD – once upon a time it was also available on VM/CMS (not sure when that was discontinued), and possibly more besides (in the 80s thru early 90s, Oracle ported their DB to just about everything under the sun, they later became much more selective in what they'd support). The z/OS port was discontinued with version 10gR2 (initial release 2005, final patchset 2010) – although, while Oracle normally puts a time limit on their pay-extra support for patches for old versions ("extended support"), exceptionally they've said for the z/OS port they'll continue offering that as long as customers want it. So the only remaining EBCDIC port of Oracle RDBMS is Fujitsu BS2000/OSD – I think the only reason that port survives is because Fujitsu pays Oracle to keep on producing it.
mksh (MirBSD's ksh) supports some custom EBCDIC encoding of UTF-8 (so-called "nega-UTF-8"), instead of proper UTF-EBCDIC. One difference is that UTF-EBCDIC avoids using the C1 controls (bytes 0x80 thru 0x9F), so EBCDIC control characters can be left intact, whereas "nega-UTF-8" just converts UTF-8 to EBCDIC using an arbitrary EBCDIC code page, hence failing to fully preserve the full complement of EBCDIC control characters. Also, while UTF-EBCDIC is based on a fixed EBCDIC code page (1047), "nega-UTF-8" isn't, so it really isn't a single encoding, rather a family of them.
Has anyone else ever implemented UTF-EBCDIC, or something similar (given neither Oracle UTFE nor mksh's nega-UTF-8 are actually UTF-EBCDIC)? Years ago, I wrote an implementation of it myself (in Java), which I've never released – not for any work-related purpose, just as a private exercise in recreational programming. Actually, I have an FTP server I wrote which serves up UTF-EBCDIC as "TYPE E", but I could never test it properly, because (at the time) I couldn't find an FTP client which actually implemented TYPE E. I think I later found one, but by then I'd lost interest in pursuing it any further.
Oracle RDBMS supports "UTFE" on EBCDIC platforms, which is to UTF-EBCDIC what CESU-8 is to UTF-8 – i.e. UTF-EBCDIC but with codepoints outside the BMP encoded using surrogates. Over the last couple of decades, the only EBCDIC platforms Oracle RDBMS has been supported on have been z/OS and BS2000/OSD – once upon a time it was also available on VM/CMS (not sure when that was discontinued), and possibly more besides (in the 80s thru early 90s, Oracle ported their DB to just about everything under the sun, they later became much more selective in what they'd support). The z/OS port was discontinued with version 10gR2 (initial release 2005, final patchset 2010) – although, while Oracle normally puts a time limit on their pay-extra support for patches for old versions ("extended support"), exceptionally they've said for the z/OS port they'll continue offering that as long as customers want it. So the only remaining EBCDIC port of Oracle RDBMS is Fujitsu BS2000/OSD – I think the only reason that port survives is because Fujitsu pays Oracle to keep on producing it.
mksh (MirBSD's ksh) supports some custom EBCDIC encoding of UTF-8 (so-called "nega-UTF-8"), instead of proper UTF-EBCDIC. One difference is that UTF-EBCDIC avoids using the C1 controls (bytes 0x80 thru 0x9F), so EBCDIC control characters can be left intact, whereas "nega-UTF-8" just converts UTF-8 to EBCDIC using an arbitrary EBCDIC code page, hence failing to fully preserve the full complement of EBCDIC control characters. Also, while UTF-EBCDIC is based on a fixed EBCDIC code page (1047), "nega-UTF-8" isn't, so it really isn't a single encoding, rather a family of them.
Has anyone else ever implemented UTF-EBCDIC, or something similar (given neither Oracle UTFE nor mksh's nega-UTF-8 are actually UTF-EBCDIC)? Years ago, I wrote an implementation of it myself (in Java), which I've never released – not for any work-related purpose, just as a private exercise in recreational programming. Actually, I have an FTP server I wrote which serves up UTF-EBCDIC as "TYPE E", but I could never test it properly, because (at the time) I couldn't find an FTP client which actually implemented TYPE E. I think I later found one, but by then I'd lost interest in pursuing it any further.