BCP (Base Control Program)

The backbone of the z/OS® system is the multiple virtual storage (MVS™) Basic Control Program with JES2 or JES3. These provide the essential services that make z/OS the system of choice when you need to process your workloads reliably, securely, with complete data integrity and without interruption.

Unicode support:

The Unicode Standard is the universal character encoding standard used for representation of text for computer processing; it provides the capacity to encode all of the characters used for the written languages of the world. z/OS Unicode support is based on Version 6.0 of the Unicode Standard, although lower versions are supported by some services. Review each individual service to see the Unicode Standard versions supported. z/OS Unicode Services supports the following services:

Character conversion
Case conversion
Normalization
Collation
Stringprep
Bidirectional transformation
Conversion information service
Dynamic locale service

Find summary and complete details about these services in z/OS Unicode Services User's Guide and Reference.

z/OS XML System Services:

z/OS XML System Services is an integrated component of the BCP. It is a system level XML parser intended for use by system components, middleware, and applications that need a simple, efficient, non-validating XML parser. It provides a buffer-in, buffer-out processing model in which the document to parse is provided by the caller in one buffer; the z/OS XML System Services parser creates a parsed record stream in another buffer, also provided by the caller. Large documents can be processed by replenishing the input buffer with more data, and reusing the output buffer or specifying a new one when it is filled. z/OS XML System Services is invoked as a callable service and provides an assembler interface for callers to use. It is accessible from normal environments such as batch and z/OS Unix System Services, as well as from more esoteric environments such as SRB mode and cross-memory.