[fpc-devel] Re: EBCDIC (was On a port of Free Pascal to, the IBM 370)

[rvmartin2 at ntlworld.com]

steve smithers <stevie at collector.org> wrote the following on 02/02/12 14:38:08:

> 
> You can do a build on a PC up to a point.  Certainly the assembler output
> could be generated, in whatever format.  It may be possible to lob this
> through the assembler and generate object files, I don't know what
> format(s) gas will write.

I had nearly 40 years of mainframe development (OS/360 through MVS and VM/SP) and it is not a comfortable environment for developing code.
My productivity went up about 200% when I got a PC as a host terminal.  I coded using my favourite PC editor then uploaded the source to the mainframe using MYTE or similar then ran it through the appropriate compiler.
For pascal programs I wrote portable code, compiling and debugging with Virtual Pascal, then uploaded and ran it through the VSPascal compiler.
   
If I was still developing pascal code for 370 etc I would like to write and test it on the PC - Free Pascal would be great - then change a parameter for FP to generate 370 assembler source to upload and compile.  It wouldn't matter whether that output was ascii or ebcdic as it could be converted on the upload, but I would probably prefer ascii so that I could check and possibly tweak it before upload.

Bob Martin