[fpc-devel] Episode 4. Addressing and it's limits Part Two

[Tomas Hajny]

On Thu, February 9, 2012 15:08, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> steve smithers wrote:
 .
 .
> "Also, the standard character set on the 360/370/Z-System is EBCDIC,
> while the Pentium uses ASCII."
>
> If the community can't get its head around the idea that character
> encoding is much more an operating system than a hardware issue, that
> the Intel/AMD range of processors could happily run an EBCDIC-based
> operating system, and that IBM gleefully supports ASCII-based Linux and
> ASCII-based Internet services then it's going to be damn difficult to
> get this (sub)project off the ground.

Just a comment on this: While I understand your statement and the Linux
port obviously confirms that an ASCII based operating system is possible
on S370 too, I wouldn't consider the character set being so completely
independent from the underlying hardware (all IBM PC compatible graphic
adapters can show ASCII characters directly but not EBCDIC, and also Intel
CPU instruction set includes support for BCD arithmetics based on the
ASCII character set if I understand it correctly).

Tomas