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Anyone got EBCDIC on their bingo cards? Because if the argument is "legacy encodings are still relevant in 2024" then we also need to bring EBCDIC (and EBCDIK and UTF-EBCDIC for more perverted fun) into the picture. Makes heuristics extra fun.

Or, you know, just say "nah, I can, those ancient stuff don't matter (outside of obligatory exceptions, like software archeology) anymore." If someone wants to feed me a KOI8-R or JIS X 0201 CSV heirloom, they should convert it into something modern first.




> Anyone got EBCDIC on their bingo cards? Because if the argument is "legacy encodings are still relevant in 2024"

I have a hobby interest in IBM mainframes and IBM i, so yes to EBCDIC for me. (I have encountered them professionally too, but only to a very limited extent.) In practice, I find looking for 0x40 (EBCDIC space) a useful heuristic. Even in binary files, since many mainframe data structures are fixed length space padded.

> then we also need to bring EBCDIC (and EBCDIK and UTF-EBCDIC for more perverted fun) into the picture. Makes heuristics extra fun.

Actual use of UTF-EBCDIC, while not nonexistent, has always been extremely rare. A person could spend an entire career dedicated to IBM mainframes and never encounter it

EBCDIK, at first I wondered if that was a joke, now I realise it is a name used for non-IBM Japanese EBCDIC code pages. Again, something one can spend a whole career in mainframes and never encounter – if one never works in Japan, if one works for a vendor whose products aren't sold in Japan, probably even if you work for a vendor whose products are sold in Japan but only to IBM sites (as opposed to Fujitsu/Hitachi sites)




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