[fpc-devel] On a port of Free Pascal to the IBM 370

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Tomas Hajny wrote:

>> I can't remember the source, but my understanding is that Wirth
>> originally worked with an IBM 029 keypunch, possibly connected preparing
>> decks for a CDC. He specifically defined (* and *) as digraphs for { and
>> }, and I think there were others including (. and .) for [ and ] Did FPC
>> /ever/ fully-support these?
> 
> These should be fine (as easily confirmed by a short test program). I
> actually use (* and *) for comments quite often to distinguish from other
> comments using { and }. ;-) I'm not aware of a digraph for the caret sign
> though which is (as correctly pointed out by you) missing in the EBCDIC
> character sets specifically targetting English (and also Portuguese
> apparently ;-) ) - it seems to exist in the "International" character
> sets.

Some of the {$ directives apparently don't have (*$ equivalents. MACRO 
if I recall correctly.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]