Well, if you are untroubled by the prospect of requiring 350 MB of ram, I can certainly see how you would be untroubled by the prospect of EBCDIC incompatibility.

Considering the amount EBCDIC machines out there, if speed really is an issue, I highly doubt the OP wants to run the same code on both an EBCDIC machine and a non-EBCDIC machine. In fact, if speed is an issue, he won't. He'll create one for the EBCDIC machines, and one for the non-EBCDIC machines. And while the average programmer that lives in the ASCII world doesn't know how to convert ASCII specific code to EBCDIC code, my bet is the average EBCDIC programmer does. So, if the OP needs to run the code on an EBCDIC machine, I'm sure he knows how to do the conversion.