Re: Old flex desperately needed (or Ebcdic port)

Daniel Pfeiffer <Daniel.Pfeiffer@start.de> wrote:
>
>The flex source contains a required file (scan.l) to be compiled by
>flex itself. Since you cannot do this before building flex, a
>compiled version is included too. However all generated code and
>tables therein are for Ascii and would look different if it were
>flexed on an Posix-compliant Ebcdic mainframe.
>
>In the flex distribution there's a port to MVS consisting of
>modifications concerning file names and short symbol names which are
>not important on our mainframe (Fujitsu Siemens BS2000). Then a few
>minor code fixes where some Asciites thought that everything from A -
>Z isupper(). And most importantly there is an Ebcdic output of
>scan.l, which alas is totally useless since it corresponds to a
>seemingly 10 year old version 2.3.6.
>
>It is totally useless, because it doesn't come near to working with
>the current version. And no version before 2.4.2 is to be found on
>the internet! And even then there are two missing diffs on the GNU
>mirrors before 2.5.1 so the older diffs cannot even be applied.
>PLEASE send me pointers (URL, CVS, mail me the sources...) to this old
>version 2.3.6, and all versions since, so I can incrementally work up
>to the current version.


Well, I can tell you what I did when I did the half port of Perl to
MVS, though it involves some hacking at a level you may not be happy
with.


I ran an up to date version of the source through flex on a Unix
(ASCII) system and checked which tables included derivations from
the values of the characters. I then converted those tables to
the values that they would have had had the characters been in
EBCDIC. This isn't as hard as it sounds.


I can't remember how much of the code (as distinct from the tables)
I had to tweak, but it wasn't all that much.




Regards,
Nick Maclaren,
University of Cambridge Computing Service,
New Museums Site, Pembroke Street, Cambridge CB2 3QG, England.
Email: nmm1@cam.ac.uk
Tel.: +44 1223 334761 Fax: +44 1223 334679

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