Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho wrote:
2012/1/18 Tomas Hajny <[email protected]>:
As pointed out in my other e-mail, "everywhere necessary" implies either
"dear user, convert all your files from the original encoding before you
want programs created in FPC to touch them"
Yes, no problem here. I assume there must be some program in this
platform which can edit ASCII text and another one (or the same) to
convert text files between encodings. If not, just use the new port to
cross-compile such a program =)
Just a moment. Granted that everybody's favourite reference site is
unavailable today, but minimal Googling suggests that MUSIC/SP- which I
believe was Paul's OS of choice- supports web browsing etc.
I think we need a reality check from Paul here, in case EBCDIC operation
is mandated only by the emulator he was planning to use (whether I think
his choice is good is irrelevant- lets try to get things like character
set resolved before it causes any more sound and fury).
It appears that MUSIC/SP requires a particular hardware opcode (IUCV) to
access TCP/IP, and that this is not provided directly by the Hercules
emulator. IUCV can be provided by either IBM VM running between Hercules
and a guest OS such as MUSIC/SP or Linux, or alternatively by running
the Sim390 emulator instead of Hercules. For completeness, Linux gets
around this by using SLIP to encapsulate IP rather than assuming that IP
(and lower-level protocols) is handled by the hardware or host OS.
I see MUSIC/SP described as "unix-like", but I don't know whether it is
sufficiently close to industry norms to run standard tools such as make,
and even if the compiler is intended to be PC-hosted I think that would
be unfortunate. MUSIC/SP running on Sim390 should have networking etc.,
but I for one have reservations about an initial port to an OS that
might turn out to be significantly removed from POSIX etc. If I have
time I might have a bit more info on this later, as well as on the
character set issue.
One important point, and I don't much like raising this, is that it
turns out that the principal maintainer of both MUSIC/SP (through his
work at McGill) and Sim390 died in 2008. I agree with Paul that a
mainframe port is worth attempting, but I've got reservations about his
choice of target hardware and OS unless he can make a case that there is
a significant number of S/370 and older (i.e. without inline operands)
S/390 still in the field.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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