Frank Heckenbach wrote:
Mirsad Todorovac wrote:
I saw EBCDIC and I was frightened.
I don't know how many routines would have to be rewritten in String and String2 units to fit in ... So, if it's not a scrict requirement, or if it doesn't become one day, I don't know if it is worthwhile ...
Did anybody run GNU Pascal on EBCDIC platform yet?
GCC only supports ASCII platforms, and it's quite unlikely this will ever change. (After all, EBCDIC is still proprietary and secret outside of IBM, AFAIK, so it might not even be possible to support it.)
GCC supports EBCDIC (grep in gcc/ for EBCDIC), for example i370-ibm-mvs is a valid configuration and it uses natively EBCDIC. AFAIK there is a GCC version targeting mvs-3.8 and running on Hercules.
Anyway, at the time Wirth designed Pascal, the question of character sets was probably a valid issue. Today, we have ISO-8859-x, Unicode, etc., but they all have ASCII as their common base, so it's pretty safe to rely on that (certainly for GPC).
Unicode is more likely to case problem then EBCDIC -- simple test if something is a digit gets quite hairy.