Re: encapsulating directory operations

"Lawrence D'Oliveiro" <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote in message
news:101dac8$mkpm$3@dont-email.me...

On Fri, 30 May 2025 18:18:43 +1000, Paul Edwards wrote:
>

(The competition for first place being IBM's C compiler for z/OS)

>
Come on, who writes C code for z/OS?

I used to at one place I worked. Neither I nor the company
were alone in the world.

Mainframes are supposed to be all
about COBOL code, aren't they? Or so we keep being told.

That would make the IBM COBOL compiler the most important
compiler in the world, not the most important C compiler in the world.

And what might IBM's COBOL compiler (and associated system utilities) be
written in? Why, its long-time systems-programming language of choice,
PL/I.

Yep - all locking you down to the most important platform
in the world.

If you want to be able to escape from this situation, in case
IBM uses its monpoly to screw you over, you probably want
to switch to IBM C, and code in C90, so that your
institution can jump ship in that situation, as there are inferior
systems waiting to accept your entire codebase.

And I know what you're thinking - all the data is in EBCDIC.
There are no other EBCDIC systems I could possibly jump to.
We would need an 80386 EBCDIC version of Win32 in order
for this to be remotely possible - which doesn't exist, and likely
never will exist.

For it to exist it would need some sort of pseudo-bios concept
that allowed charset conversion. And no such thing exists as far
as I am aware!


Watch this spot.

D:\devel\pdos\pdpclib>grep EBCDIC makefile.p32
makefile.p32: # define this if you are producing an EBCDIC to ASCII
pseudo-bios
makefile.p32: # char needs to be unsigned for EBCDIC so this should be

D:\devel\pdos\pdpclib>

BFN. Paul.