On 24/12/16 11:30, Bernd Oppolzer wrote:
Hello Mark,
on several occasions, I looked what FPC does, when I extended the
Stanford compiler, for example when I added support for direct write
of scalars.
At one time I recall that I decided explicitly to take another direction;
that was when I allowed shorter string constants to be assigned to
longer ones, for example:
var x: array [1 .. 200] of char;
x := 'some string';
IIRC, FPC fills with hex zeroes, but I prefer blanks - the blank
representation
of the target system ... which is different on the target systems; this
should
show to some of the readers here which are not familiar with IBM mainframes
some of the difficulties I had to get the P-Code really portable ... all
I think the issue of padding partially-initialised data structures is
something that merits wider discussion. Provided of course that we can
avoid the sort of arcana that Paul/Kerravon is enmired in :-)
chars in
the (character) P-Code file had to be converted to character constants; all
places where character A - for example - was represented as numeric 193
(which is EBCDIC 'A') had to be found and corrected. Even such places where
the reference to 193 was not recognized at first sight, that is: offsets in
branch tables and bit strings representing sets.
I think you've made creditable progress in a difficult area. What are
you doing about PRED() and SUCC() as applied to CHARs?
Anybody with any sort of interest in mainframes is going to have to
consider EBCDIC for quite some while, but unfortunately there are still
people who insist that it's flawless. One of our wiki pages has somebody
confirm that EBCDIC has ^, but he then goes on to admit that it's not in
all codepages...
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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