Hi ZA. This concept of "C is not available in many many shops" is the exact reason I spent a large chunk of my life porting GCC to MVS (gccmvs). I considered the lack of a universal language for computers to be a serious flaw in the computer industry. With the advent of GCCMVS, C is now either bundled, or freely available, on every commercially-used computer environment, as far as I know. Even z/VSE has been covered.
With GCC ported, I was able to port other very useful tools such as diff3 (three-way diffs are one of the greatest advances in computer science in my opinion). People can easily have a free MVS environment at home for developing such software. And if for some reason you need a real z/OS instead of MVS 3.8j, that is also available at an affordable price (z/PDT from memory). BFN. Paul. Bob Wrote: >The open source Linux tools generally require porting, which require a >mainframe, which most folks don't have at home, so open source isn't >significant in the mainframe arena. This is the main issue really, getting a descent and legitimate development environment is tough. And then there is another, related subject, most open source is written in C which is NOT available in many many shops. It is a legitimate, fully developed and wonderful compiler in z/OS but it cost money and many shops just don't spend that money. So even if you go through the trouble of porting the open source into Classic z/OS (PDSE's, JCL, at al) as I did when I ported the PCRE library, it's not good enough because many potential users cannot build it anyway. Providing binaries might have been a solution had we not have to deal with the bizarre EBCDIC issue. The issue is not so much that EBCDIC is different then ASCII, that is relatively easy to handle. The issue is that if you provide a binary for IBM-1047 it surely won't work on a IBM-1026 Turkish or Greek or any other language. Bottom line, the port as well as it done is basically unavailable. I am pretty disappointed because I really wanted to start a trend. ZA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
