rvmartin2 at ntlworld.com wrote:
In the current case I was relying on the precedent set by the GCC porters and the Linux maintainers to say "OK, we need to have some policy to determine what vintage of hardware is supported". However noting the availability of old IBM operating systems and the interest people have in running them, and in particular noting the amount of work being put into the OS/380 project, I'm fairly rapidly coming to the conclusion that the S/370 is worth supporting, even if we brush the S/360 under the carpet.
> > To an application programmer there is (was?) little difference between > 360 and 370. > > I'm puzzled by this whole idea of Free Pascal supporting 360/370. > Who is it aimed at? Who needs it?
Sorry Bob, I find that some of your postings aren't getting past our gateway, so I only see them in the archive.
To answer your question: I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect anybody who wants to run on any of the freely-available "classic" operating systems /particularly/ VM where the available version is VM/370 which could be expected to have problems if asked to support virtualised guests including S/390-specific opcodes.
My initial suggestion was to support anything from the S/390 G5 onwards, i.e. the same as Linux and (at least approximately) GCC. Paul's gone very quiet, Steve is making a fairly good case that there are sufficient well-understood workarounds that supporting S/370 if not S/360 should be possible, so I for one am happy to go with the flow on the target CPU (even if I express a strong preference for Linux and ASCII as the initial operating system targets).
-- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues] _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
