dick scherrer
Moderator Emeritus
Joined: 23 Nov 2006
Posts: 19244
Location: Inside the Matrix
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Hello,
It doesn't "work" - it just is. When you see the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,etc you might consider that a "collating sequence". If you had 4,3,6,8,2,1,9 there is no "order" just some values.
The collating sequence determines the order (ascending or descending) you will get if you sort the values. It is also the basis for comparing "greater than" and "less than".
You need to get a list of the ASCII and EBCDIC values from x'00' to x'FF' and see how they represent letters, numbers, special chatacters, etc. If memory serves an x'31' is the number one in ASCII while x"F1" is the number one in EBCDIC - x'20' is a space in ASCII and x'40' is a space in EBCDIC.
The IBM collating sequence is different from most others in that it is EBCDIC based while most unix and windows platforms are ASCII based. |
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