[fpc-devel] [Slightly off-topic]Mark Morgan Lloyd: Burroughs emulator

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Reinier Olislagers wrote:
> On 08/08/2014 12:45, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
>> Reinier Olislagers wrote:
> <snip>
> 
> Interesting - sounds like a huge job you're tackling there & thanks a lot!
> 
> I keep wanting to give the javascript emulator a go but each time manage
> to tell myself that I already have more than enough projects that I can
> work on rather than messing with an entirely new (ehm for me) environment ;)

I'm hoping to be able to make it a bit more friendly. I've got a 
terminal I wrote to drive an APL interpreter, which I've extended to 
support emulated card readers etc.

One of the interesting things from the POV of a Pascal user is the 
extent to which, when submitting a job via a card reader, control cards 
to specify things like attached files and supplementary chunks of source 
are interleaved.

I'd add that the 5x00 series predated EBCDIC, they use a 6-bit code for 
characters which adds to the challenge when e.g. drag-and-dropping a 
file to the reader. Later machines had both EBCDIC and two, 
incompatible, 6-bit codes... the IBM emulation people don't know how 
lucky they are :-)

I'd also add that in most cases the customary base is octal, and I'm 
using the Smalltalk-style radix indicator at the command line, i.e. 8r20 
is 16 decimal.

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

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