EBCDIC (was: Language change proposal)

[Joachim Durchholz]

Eric Merritt wrote:

>  EBCDIC is far, far from dead. Its usually only used
> on big iron like a 390 but its still used in the
> midrange realm on the as400s too. I wouldn't mind 
> seeing erlang for 400s or 390s. Then you have some of
> the most reliable code running on some of the most
> reliable hardware on the planet.

That's indeed true. AS/400 boxes are known for their rock-solid 
hardware. (The software is quite stable as well, though RPG sucks even 
when it's stable.)

Having Erlang on these platforms might create a new niche for it. 
Erlang's stability claims would certainly ring a bell with those 
stability-minded enough to pay the price for an AS/400.

Note that OS/400 (the operating system shipped with AS/400) comes with a 
Posix subsystem that actually uses ASCII, so at least for these 
machines, no EBCDIC support is required.
I think that the AS/400 also ship with Linux, so it might be that Erlang 
is already running on some AS/400 boxes :-)

BTW OS/400, even with a Posix subsystem, is a quite different beast than 
Unix. Anybody who uses Erlang on OS/400 should expect to write wrappers 
for many OS services.

Regards,
Jo