UTF-EBCDIC

One of the main applications of UTF-8 is to allow the use of Unicode text in systems that were designed for ASCII text. This is why regular ASCII text is also legal UTF-8. UTF-8 isn't the first international character encoding to be in some way backward compatible with ASCII—quite a few encodings for various languages are backward compatible with ASCII in the same way and for the same reason.

The other 8-bit encoding for Latin text that has huge bodies of text encoded in it is EBCDIC, IBM's Extended Binary-Coded Decimal Information Code. A lot of legacy data is encoded in EBCDIC, and many legacy systems are designed to assume that textual data are encoded in EBCDIC. UTF-EBCDIC (sometimes called UTF-8-EBCDIC), much like UTF-8, is designed ...

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