EBCDIC

EBCDIC is an acronym for Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code: it is a binary code that employs an eight-bit character set. EBCDIC was initially designed for IBM operating systems.In binary form, it encodes each of the alphabetic characters, numerical digit, and other signs, along with punctuation marks and other non-ASCII characters. It can hold up to 256 characters giving multilingual and multi-encoding support for the different languages and characters. However, one of the clear disadvantages of using EBCDIC is that the data are restricted by EBCDIC codes and hence do not allow a translation of those codes to, say, ASCII code, thereby making it difficult to transfer data from one format to another.

The advantages and disadvantages of EBCDIC

So now that we know EBCDIC stands for let us turn attention to the merits and demerits of this coding scheme.

Advantages of EBCDIC:

Legacy Support: EBCDIC has been used in the older IBM mainframe systems and is still employed because certain servers and some databases that were implemented using EBCDIC still have to function correctly.

Support for Specialized Characters: As compared to some of the other encoding systems, EBCDIC is much more universal in its approach as it can handle many a character and symbols, other than the Latin alphabet.

Efficient Storage: EBCDIC helps to pack large amount of data in very little space without in any way degrading the quality of such data and this is why it became so popular in the first place.

Disadvantages of EBCDIC:

Compatibility Issues: EBCDIC is not easily understood by many modern forms of technology and to translate it to the more popular forms such as ASCII, a middleware or an encoding format has to first translate the EBCDIC.

Language and Translation Limitations: In the present software, the probability of implementing EBCDIC is even more unlikely because latest programming language does not support it.

Declining Expertise: Since it has been in existence for almost five decades and use in recent years has sharply dwindled, it has become almost hard to find developers who can understand how to use this encoding system that is EBCDIC and hence to maintain systems that still use this encoding system is really proving hard.