[cfarm-users] EBCDIC

[Thorsten Glaser]

On Fri, 28 Aug 2026, Bruno Haible via cfarm-users wrote:

> cfarm191 has a GCC that can also compile 32-bit binaries ("gcc -m31");
> that's the older "s390" architecture. Nice!

Ah, good, with the demise of Debian/s390 I have been unable to test
things for that. Obscure architectures have often interesting corner
cases that expose unportable assumptions easier.

>Peter Gutmann wrote:
>> It's been awhile since I've been able to test the EBCDIC handling in my code.
>
>Unless the "IBM i" operating system is among your portability targets,
>you can ditch this EBCDIC handling. The reason:

Perhaps, but I’ve got requests for mksh for EBCDIC z/OS, and maybe
if access to such (with the usual ftp and telnet doing codeset
conversion in text mode) could be obtained, we could resume working
on that, it is very difficult to do if I cannot debug it directly.

Linux/s390{,x} being an ASCII environment is, of course, only proper.

bye,
//mirabilos
-- 
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