This document is written in pod format hence there are punctuation
-characters in in odd places. Do not worry, you've apparently got the
+characters in odd places. Do not worry, you've apparently got the
ASCII->EBCDIC translation worked out correctly. You can read more
about pod in pod/perlpod.pod or the short summary in the INSTALL file.
=head1 NAME
-README.posix-bc - building and installing Perl for BS2000 POSIX.
+perlbs2000 - building and installing Perl for BS2000.
+
+B<This document needs to be updated, but we don't know what it should say.
+Please email comments to L<perlbug@perl.org|mailto:perlbug@perl.org>.>
=head1 SYNOPSIS
=head1 DESCRIPTION
This is a ported perl for the POSIX subsystem in BS2000 VERSION OSD
-V3.1A. It may work on other versions, but that's the one we've tested
-it on.
+V3.1A or later. It may work on other versions, but we started porting
+and testing it with 3.1A and are currently using Version V4.0A.
You may need the following GNU programs in order to install perl:
-=head2 gzip
+=head2 gzip on BS2000
We used version 1.2.4, which could be installed out of the box with
one failure during 'make check'.
-=head2 bison
+=head2 bison on BS2000
The yacc coming with BS2000 POSIX didn't work for us. So we had to
use bison. We had to make a few changes to perl in order to use the
pure (reentrant) parser of bison. We used version 1.25, but we had to
-add a few changes due to EBCDIC.
+add a few changes due to EBCDIC. See below for more details
+concerning yacc.
-=head2 Unpacking
+=head2 Unpacking Perl Distribution on BS2000
To extract an ASCII tar archive on BS2000 POSIX you need an ASCII
filesystem (we used the mountpoint /usr/local/ascii for this). Now
IO_CONVERSION=YES
cp -r /usr/local/ascii/perl5.005_02 ./
-=head2 Compiling
+=head2 Compiling Perl on BS2000
-There is a "hints" file for posix-bc that specifies the correct values
-for most things. The major problem is (of course) the EBCDIC character
-set. We have german EBCDIC version.
+There is a "hints" file for BS2000 called hints.posix-bc (because
+posix-bc is the OS name given by `uname`) that specifies the correct
+values for most things. The major problem is (of course) the EBCDIC
+character set. We have german EBCDIC version.
Because of our problems with the native yacc we used GNU bison to
generate a pure (=reentrant) parser for perly.y. So our yacc is
We build perl using GNU make. We tried the native make once and it
worked too.
-=head2 Testing
+=head2 Testing Perl on BS2000
We still got a few errors during C<make test>. Some of them are the
result of using bison. Bison prints I<parser error> instead of I<syntax
lib/dumper..........FAILED tests 43, 45
Failed 11/231 test scripts, 95.24% okay. 57/10595 subtests failed, 99.46% okay.
-=head2 Install
+=head2 Installing Perl on BS2000
We have no nroff on BS2000 POSIX (yet), so we ignored any errors while
installing the documentation.
-=head2 Using Perl
+=head2 Using Perl in the Posix-Shell of BS2000
BS2000 POSIX doesn't support the shebang notation
(C<#!/usr/local/bin/perl>), so you have to use the following lines
eval 'exec /usr/local/bin/perl -S $0 ${1+"$@"}'
if $running_under_some_shell;
-=head2 Floating point anomalies
+=head2 Using Perl in "native" BS2000
+
+We don't have much experience with this yet, but try the following:
+
+Copy your Perl executable to a BS2000 LLM using bs2cp:
+
+C<bs2cp /usr/local/bin/perl 'bs2:perl(perl,l)'>
+
+Now you can start it with the following (SDF) command:
+
+C</START-PROG FROM-FILE=*MODULE(PERL,PERL),PROG-MODE=*ANY,RUN-MODE=*ADV>
+
+First you get the BS2000 commandline prompt ('*'). Here you may enter
+your parameters, e.g. C<-e 'print "Hello World!\\n";'> (note the
+double backslash!) or C<-w> and the name of your Perl script.
+Filenames starting with C</> are searched in the Posix filesystem,
+others are searched in the BS2000 filesystem. You may even use
+wildcards if you put a C<%> in front of your filename (e.g. C<-w
+checkfiles.pl %*.c>). Read your C/C++ manual for additional
+possibilities of the commandline prompt (look for
+PARAMETER-PROMPTING).
+
+=head2 Floating point anomalies on BS2000
There appears to be a bug in the floating point implementation on BS2000 POSIX
systems such that calling int() on the product of a number and a small
Although one would expect the quantities $y and $z to be the same and equal
to 100000 they will differ and instead will be 0 and 100000 respectively.
+=head2 Using PerlIO and different encodings on ASCII and EBCDIC partitions
+
+Since version 5.8 Perl uses the new PerlIO on BS2000. This enables
+you using different encodings per IO channel. For example you may use
+
+ use Encode;
+ open($f, ">:encoding(ascii)", "test.ascii");
+ print $f "Hello World!\n";
+ open($f, ">:encoding(posix-bc)", "test.ebcdic");
+ print $f "Hello World!\n";
+ open($f, ">:encoding(latin1)", "test.latin1");
+ print $f "Hello World!\n";
+ open($f, ">:encoding(utf8)", "test.utf8");
+ print $f "Hello World!\n";
+
+to get two files containing "Hello World!\n" in ASCII, EBCDIC, ISO
+Latin-1 (in this example identical to ASCII) respective UTF-EBCDIC (in
+this example identical to normal EBCDIC). See the documentation of
+Encode::PerlIO for details.
+
+As the PerlIO layer uses raw IO internally, all this totally ignores
+the type of your filesystem (ASCII or EBCDIC) and the IO_CONVERSION
+environment variable. If you want to get the old behavior, that the
+BS2000 IO functions determine conversion depending on the filesystem
+PerlIO still is your friend. You use IO_CONVERSION as usual and tell
+Perl, that it should use the native IO layer:
+
+ export IO_CONVERSION=YES
+ export PERLIO=stdio
+
+Now your IO would be ASCII on ASCII partitions and EBCDIC on EBCDIC
+partitions. See the documentation of PerlIO (without C<Encode::>!)
+for further possibilities.
+
=head1 AUTHORS
Thomas Dorner
=head2 Mailing list
-The Perl Institute (http://www.perl.org/) maintains a perl-mvs mailing
-list of interest to all folks building and/or using perl on EBCDIC
-platforms. To subscribe, send a message of:
+If you are interested in the z/OS (formerly known as OS/390)
+and POSIX-BC (BS2000) ports of Perl then see the perl-mvs mailing list.
+To subscribe, send an empty message to perl-mvs-subscribe@perl.org.
+
+See also:
+
+ https://lists.perl.org/list/perl-mvs.html
- subscribe perl-mvs
+There are web archives of the mailing list at:
-to majordomo@perl.org.
+ http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl-mvs/
+ http://archive.develooper.com/perl-mvs@perl.org/
=head1 HISTORY
https://perl5.git.perl.org / perl5.git / blobdiff