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Codepages
All text in any language or on any platform is in a codepage.
A codepage is a map that links a character to one or more bytes.
ASCII codepages are use on most platforms, but in OS/390 and other platforms EBCDIC is used instead.
The basic PC codepage is 'Cp1252'The basic mainframe codepage is 'Cp1047'
Limits:
COBOL only supports the codepage of the platform it is running on.
C and Java support multiple codepages and can use different ones at once.
Double Byte Character Sets (DBCS)
These are codepages where each character is a set of 2 byte values.
Limits:
Supported in COBOL for OS/390 and VM, C and Java.
Unicode
These are codepages where each character can be anything from 1 to 4 byte values.
Limits:
Supported from Enterprise COBOL for z/OS and OS/390 Version 3, C and Java.