Re: encapsulating directory operations

On 2025-06-04, Paul Edwards <mutazilah@gmail.com> wrote:

If I have existing C code that does:
>
fopen("test1.dat", "rb");
fread into buf
if (memcmp(buf + 5, "XYZ", 3) == 0)
>
and test1.dat is in EBCDIC, the above program on the 80386
has been compiled with EBCDIC strings, so it works, and then
now you do:
>
printf("It matches!\n");
>
where do you expect those characters in the printf string - all
currently EBCDIC - to be translated to ASCII on a modern
Windows 10/11 system?

I think that in this case you would ideally want the EBCDIC-enabled
compiler to have extensions for working with both character sets.

For isntance E"foo" would specify a string object that is
encoded in EBCDIC in the execution environment, whereas
"foo" is ASCII.

You could develop a textual preprocesor which implements
this transformation: tokenizes the C well enough to recognize
string literals preceded by E, and translates them to
string literals without E, whose content is EBCDIC bytes.

It wouldn't have to be absoultely perfect; only to work
correctly on your small amount of private code.

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