michael.vancann...@wisa.be wrote the following on 30/01/12 16:35:20: > > > On Mon, 30 Jan 2012, rvmart...@ntlworld.com wrote: > > > michael.vancann...@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. > > I had in mind the following scenario: > > 1) Somehow we build - using cross-compilation - a first version of the > compiler that actually runs on the 370. This binary is transferred to a > 370 machine. > > 2) The sources of the compiler and RTL are transferred to the 370. > I assume that after the file transfer, the sources are still in ASCII > format ?
No - sending source code from a PC to a 370 performs an automatic translation to EBCDIC (and vice versa). > > 3) At that point the compiler can try to recompile itself on the 370 > machine. > > Unless you have performed some tranformation of the compiler/RTL sources, > the compiler in step 3 will read and compile from ASCII sources, no ? IBM 370 doesn't use ASCII, anywhere, but it has a hardware instruction (TRT _ Translate and Test) which can convert between character sets in a single instruction using a suitable table. _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
