case folding failure on EBCDIC

Hi,
The following unicode folding test fails on EBCDIC
(perl-5.8.6) :

$a = '0178';
$b = '00FF';

$a1 = pack("U0U*", hex $code);
$b1 = pack("U0U*", map { hex } split " ", $mapping);

if (":$b1:" =~ /:[$a1]:/i) {
print "ok\n";
}

Alternately, if $a = '0178', and $b = '00DF', the test
passes.

Why is this so ? 
Is it because \xFF as a border case ( 1 less than 256)
is not properly handled ?

Does someone have any thoughts on the source of the
problem ?

Thanks in advance,
Rajarshi.



                
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