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

[Sven Barth]

On 30.01.2012 20:31, steve smithers wrote:
>> Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote on Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:40:27 +0100
>> Existing source code frequently assumes ASCII encoding. The obvious are
>> upper/lowercase conversions, by and/or or add/sub constant values to the
>> characters. It will be hell to find and fix all such code in the
>> compiler and RTL, even if only the constants have to be modified for
>> EBCDIC. Even code with the assumed order of common characters (' '<  '0'
>> <  'A'<  'a') has to be found and fixed manually - how would you even
>> *find* code with such implicit assumptions?
>
> It does indeed.  I am aware of the problems inherent in this.  But the RTL
> has to be more or less rewritten anyway to support OS.  OS is a very different
> animal to Windows or Linux.

The RTL consists of two parts (though the border is not easily visible): 
a platform independant one and a platform dependant one. A port to a 
different target normally only includes touching the platform dependant 
one, but a port to 370 also requires touching the platform independant 
one. This is what DoDi talks about.

@other devs: Could the code page aware AnsiString type be of any help here?

Regards,
Sven