Porting Swift to the mainframe has opened up the world of encodings to me in horrible ways I had only heard of previously. Swift demands Unicode (UTF-8, mainly), and z/OS can support it, but it’s a logisitical challenge. A lot of mainframe customers don’t use English as their primary language, and given that z/OS is natively EBCDIC, you end up with a whole host of problems, not the least of which is actually viewing your source code on the system itself.
With all the file tagging, auto-conversion, and code pages, having Unicode as the default, despite all of its complexity, would be vastly simpler.
Porting Swift to the mainframe has opened up the world of encodings to me in horrible ways I had only heard of previously. Swift demands Unicode (UTF-8, mainly), and z/OS can support it, but it’s a logisitical challenge. A lot of mainframe customers don’t use English as their primary language, and given that z/OS is natively EBCDIC, you end up with a whole host of problems, not the least of which is actually viewing your source code on the system itself.
With all the file tagging, auto-conversion, and code pages, having Unicode as the default, despite all of its complexity, would be vastly simpler.
See also https://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2016-utf8.pdf