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

[rvmartin2 at ntlworld.com]

michael.vancanneyt at wisa.be wrote the following on 30/01/12 14:49:53:

> I think the reason for producing an ASCII version first is very simple: 
> All FPC sources - including the compiler - are in ASCII encoding.

I don't understand this statement - ASCII and EBCDIC are just human representations of a computer's internal code.
I write my programs in the Latin (or Roman) alphabet and the computer does the rest.
When I was writing VS/Pascal programs I used the same source code as input to VS/Pascal on the mainframe and to Virtual Pascal on the PC.

Unless the FP source code is to be fed into a mainframe compiler like IBM's VS/Pascal or the Stanford compiler then the first step is surely to write a backend for the (eg PC) compiler to produce 370 assembler code.  Producing EBCDIC rather than ASCII sounds a trivial part of the task.