NAME
perlbs2000 - building and installing Perl for BS2000.
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SYNOPSIS
This document will help you Configure, build, test and install Perl on BS2000 in the POSIX subsystem.
DESCRIPTION
This is a ported perl for the POSIX subsystem in BS2000 VERSION OSD 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:
gzip on
BS2000
We used version 1.2.4, which could be installed out of the
box with one failure during ’make check’.
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. See
below for more details concerning yacc.
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 you extract the archive in the
ASCII filesystem without I/O-conversion:
cd /usr/local/ascii export IO_CONVERSION=NO gunzip < /usr/local/src/perl.tar.gz | pax -r
You may ignore the error message for the first element of the archive (this doesn’t look like a tar archive / skipping to next file...), it’s only the directory which will be created automatically anyway.
After extracting the archive you copy the whole directory tree to your EBCDIC filesystem. This time you use I/O-conversion:
cd /usr/local/src IO_CONVERSION=YES cp -r /usr/local/ascii/perl5.005_02 ./
Compiling
Perl on BS2000
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 really the following script:
-----8<-----/usr/local/bin/yacc-----8<----- #! /usr/bin/sh
# Bison as a reentrant yacc:
# save
parameters: params="" while [[ $# -gt 1 ]]; do
params="$params $1"
shift done
# add flag %pure_parser:
tmpfile=/tmp/bison.$$.y echo %pure_parser > $tmpfile cat $1 >> $tmpfile
# call bison:
echo "/usr/local/bin/bison --yacc $params $1\t\t\t(Pure Parser)" /usr/local/bin/bison --yacc $params $tmpfile
# cleanup:
rm -f $tmpfile -----8<----------8<-----
We still use the normal yacc for a2p.y though!!! We made a softlink called byacc to distinguish between the two versions:
ln -s /usr/bin/yacc /usr/local/bin/byacc
We build perl using GNU make. We tried the native make once and it worked too.
Testing Perl
on BS2000
We still got a few errors during "make
test". Some of them are the result of using bison.
Bison prints parser error instead of syntax
error, so we may ignore them. The following list shows
our errors, your results may differ:
op/numconvert.......FAILED tests 1409-1440 op/regexp...........FAILED tests 483, 496 op/regexp_noamp.....FAILED tests 483, 496 pragma/overload.....FAILED tests 152-153, 170-171 pragma/warnings.....FAILED tests 14, 82, 129, 155, 192, 205, 207 lib/bigfloat........FAILED tests 351-352, 355 lib/bigfltpm........FAILED tests 354-355, 358 lib/complex.........FAILED tests 267, 487 lib/dumper..........FAILED tests 43, 45 Failed 11/231 test scripts, 95.24% okay. 57/10595 subtests failed, 99.46% okay.
Installing
Perl on BS2000
We have no nroff on BS2000 POSIX (yet), so we
ignored any errors while installing the documentation.
Using Perl
in the Posix-Shell of BS2000
BS2000 POSIX doesn’t support the shebang
notation ("#!/usr/local/bin/perl"), so
you have to use the following lines instead:
: # use perl
eval ’exec /usr/local/bin/perl -S $0
${1+"$@"}’
if $running_under_some_shell;
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:
"bs2cp /usr/local/bin/perl 'bs2:perl(perl,l)'"
Now you can start it with the following ( SDF ) command:
"/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. "-e 'print "Hello World!\\n";'" (note the double backslash!) or "-w" and the name of your Perl script. Filenames starting with "/" are searched in the Posix filesystem, others are searched in the BS2000 filesystem. You may even use wildcards if you put a "%" in front of your filename (e.g. "-w checkfiles.pl %*.c"). Read your C/C ++ manual for additional possibilities of the commandline prompt (look for PARAMETER-PROMPTING).
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 magnitude number is not the same as calling
int() on the quotient of that number and a large
magnitude number. For example, in the following Perl
code:
my $x = 100000.0; my $y = int($x * 1e-5) * 1e5; # '0' my $z = int($x / 1e+5) * 1e5; # '100000' print "\$y is $y and \$z is $z\n"; # $y is 0 and $z is 100000
Although one would expect the quantities $y and $z to be the same and equal to 100000 they will differ and instead will be 0 and 100000 respectively.
Using PerlIO
and different encodings on ASCII and
EBCDIC partitions
Since version 5.8 Perl uses the new PerlIO on
BS2000. This enables you using different
encodings per IO channel. For example you may
use
use Encode; open($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 "Encode::"!) for further possibilities.
AUTHORS
Thomas Dorner
SEE ALSO
INSTALL , perlport.
Mailing
list
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 [AT] perl.org.
See also:
https://lists.perl.org/list/perl-mvs.html
There are web archives of the mailing list at:
https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.mvs/
HISTORY
This document was originally written by Thomas Dorner for the 5.005 release of Perl.
This document was podified for the 5.6 release of perl 11 July 2000.