Re: APL - Alive and Well!

> So one of the biggest obstacle (ASCII vs EBCDIC) should be eliminated
> once everything is Unicode - right?

Yes, but I doubt that will happen anytime soon.

Think about your PC, or Mac,,,, I'll bet that most of your text files are 
ASCII, not Unicode.  This is true on most systems; plain text files are 
almost always saved using the hardware's native codepage.  On Intel, 
PowerPC, and Sparc this is ASCII.  On IBM mainframes, it's EBCDIC.  Not
only 
that, but which ASCII and which EBCDIC codepage is used to encode the data

usually depends on the geographic region in which it was encoded.

Unicode is good for moving data between systems.  But there simply is not 
yet any overriding reason for everyone in the world to convert all their 
text data to Unicode.  If you were a CIO, would you recommend that your 
company rewrite all your software to use Unicode?  As long as there legacy

software that uses native codepages (which is the vast majority of the 
software in the world), there will be continuing use of ASCII and EBCDIC.

Finally, the codepage question is just one example of hardware
differences. 
There are others including IEEE versus 370 representations of floating
point 
data and big-endian and little-endian storage of data in memory.  All of 
these issues are surmountable.  It's just a question of resources.  But
the 
point is, they all make it impossible to run binary object code on all 
hardware platforms.

David Liebtag
IBM APL Products and Services