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umm, aren't almost all COBOL programs on mainframes which would be EBCDIC and not ASCII.
My very limited experience with COBOL was on machines running AOS/VS and then some version of Solaris. Both used ASCII.
Peoplesoft, about 25 years ago, used a lot of COBOL, and as best I recall it mostly ran its back end on UNIX of one sort or another--that was how I encountered it on Solaris.
I.e, it is all ASCII's fault. But what would EBCDIC spaces look like in my electric bill?
He gave that also: you get 4s instead of 2s.
My mistake.