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

[Tomas Hajny]

On Wed, January 18, 2012 11:22, Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho wrote:
> 2012/1/18 Tomas Hajny <XHajT03 at hajny.biz>:
>> ...except for the EBCDIC stuff, because the common parts of our RTL
>> assume
>> ASCII in many places
>
> If it was me implementing I would simply convert between both types
> everywhere necessary and leave the RTL using ASCII.

As pointed out in my other e-mail, "everywhere necessary" implies either
"dear user, convert all your files from the original encoding before you
want programs created in FPC to touch them" or "dear programmer targetting
OS/370, make sure that your programs are limited in what RTL functions you
use, or convert all locally stored files to ASCII and only use the RTL
functions for text processing on the converted copies". Otherwise even
stuff like line by line reading or field by field reading of the input
text file using standard RTL routines may not work as expected with the
current RTL.

Tomas