AW: Ebcdic rule

[Pfeiffer Daniel]

Hallo Paul,

Der Name klingt deutsch, aber wegen des CCs auf englisch:

> ----------
> Von:  Paul Eggert[SMTP:address@hidden
> Gesendet:     Dienstag, 2. Oktober 2001 19:40
> An:   address@hidden
> Cc:   address@hidden
> Betreff:      Re: Ebcdic rule
> 
> > From: Pfeiffer Daniel <address@hidden>
> > Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2001 18:49:50 +0200
> > 
> > ever since everybody's shouting "We're open!", mainframes have learned a
> few
> > Unix manners, which is a good thing.  Alas, while being quite close to
> > Posix, they'll use Ebcdic rather than Ascii, which causes no end of
> > headaches.
> 
> Wow.  Are you actually using such mainframes to run GNU applications?
> I thought that, these days, most of those people were running in ASCII
> (or Latin-1 or UTF-8) mode, even on mainframes.
> 
You don't think I _want_ to be doing this, do you :-(  We're lightyears away
from unicode and even Ascii support is very mixed.

> > [ "`echo A`" = "`echo '\0301'`" ]
> 
> Why do you need an Autoconf test for this?  Can't you put
> something like the following into your C code?
> 
> #if 'A' == '\301'
>  printf ("Looks like we're using EBCDIC.");
> #endif
> 
Wow, that's neat!

> Also, some 'echo' implementations don't treat backslash specially,
> so your shell script looks fishy.
> 
Actually I've thrown out shell because of all those little traps in favour
of Perl long ago.  But configure is a /bin/sh affair...

> In my experience, the main problem with porting to EBCDIC is not
> detecting whether the host uses EBCDIC; it's all the existing code
> that assumes ASCII without thinking.  E.g., 'a' <=x && x <= 'z'
> succeeds for some bytes that are not lower-case letters in EBCDIC.
> 
Yes, actually I'm trying to port flex to our mainframe.  There are a few of
this kind, which I replace by isupper() but also some others where I need
#if.  I'll be replacing this with yours :-)

> (And don't get me started about east-Asian EBCDIC extensions like
> EBCDIK.  :-)
> 
(ok, I won't, we've got about 5 ebcdic variations here locally, that's more
than my share :-)

Thanks
Daniel

> -- 
> Kommunikation ist unwahrscheinlich.  /  Komunikado estas neprobable.
>                       Niklas Luhmann, Soziologe / Sociikisto
> 
>