Are there issues in migrating EBCDIC code to the Unicode .NET environment?
Yes, though NeoKicks provides support to make the transition easy. Unicode is a multi-byte encoding system and as such can require changes in field and record lengths – a possibly challenging exercise. NeoKicks therefore supports the data in ACP (ANSI Code Page, that we generally think of as “ASCII”) format, which is the best match for EBCDIC’s single-byte encoding. The NeoKicks system handles the conversions between ACP and Unicode required for interfacing with the .NET Framework. Data is therefore converted from EBCDIC to the appropriate ACP. Tools are provided with NetCOBOL to assist with this data conversion. Code also needs to be reviewed for points where its behavior may depend on EBCDIC values such as: – EBCDIC values hard coded as hexadecimal constants – Comparisons that assume the EBCDIC collating sequence order – File I/O that assumes the EBCDIC collating sequence order Fujitsu has considerable experience in this area and can help you in this CICS migration process.
