ASCII vs. EBCDIC

ASCII American Standard Code for Information Interchange also known as ANSI X3.4

7 bit code uses 8th bit as most significant bit for error checking.

Text files stored in ASCII format are sometimes called ASCII files. Text editors and word processors are usually capable of storing data in ASCII format, although ASCII format is not always the default storage format. Most data files, particularly if they contain numeric data, are not stored in ASCII format. Executable programs are never stored in ASCII format.

65 – 90 : A – Z
97 – 122 : a – z
48 – 57 : 0 – 9

EBCDIC Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (pronounced either “ehb-suh-dik” or “ehb-kuh-dik”) is a binary code for alphabetic and numeric characters that IBM developed for its larger operating systems.

# Character Set used by IBM Mainframe.

# Use Full 8 bit code so there is no parity checking bit (as in ASCII).

# Wider range of control characters than ASCII.

0000 0000 to 0011 1111 : CONTROL CHARACTER
0100 0000 to 0111 1111  : PUNCTUATION CHARACTER
1000 0000 to 1011 1111  : LOWERCASE CHARACTER
1100 0000 to 1111 1111   : UPPERCASE CHARACTER AND NUMBERS

Why EBCDIC is better than ASCII?

# Easier to use on Punched Cards.

# Include the ⊄ (cent sign) that ASCII doesn’t.

Why ASCII is better than EBCDIC?

# Writing Code; Where EBCDIC is a mess.

# Most of the World runs on ASCII.
Standard version of EBCDIC does not have [ ] \ { } ^ ~ |.

# EBCDIC’s some variants are incompatible with other variants of EBCDIC.
Documentation is very hard on EBCDIC.

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