perlbs2000

NAME

README.BS2000 - building and installing Perl for BS2000.

SYNOPSIS

This document will help you Configure, build, test and install Perl on \s-1BS2000\s0 in the \s-1POSIX\s0 subsystem.

DESCRIPTION

This is a ported perl for the \s-1POSIX\s0 subsystem in \s-1BS2000\s0 \s-1VERSION\s0 \s-1OSD\s0 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 \s-1GNU\s0 programs in order to install perl:

gzip on \s-1BS2000\s0

We used version 1.2.4, which could be installed out of the box with one failure during 'make check'.

bison on \s-1BS2000\s0

The yacc coming with \s-1BS2000\s0 \s-1POSIX\s0 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 \s-1EBCDIC\s0. See below for more details concerning yacc.

Unpacking Perl Distribution on \s-1BS2000\s0

To extract an \s-1ASCII\s0 tar archive on \s-1BS2000\s0 \s-1POSIX\s0 you need an \s-1ASCII\s0 filesystem (we used the mountpoint /usr/local/ascii for this). Now you extract the archive in the \s-1ASCII\s0 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 \s-1EBCDIC\s0 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 \s-1BS2000\s0

There is a “hints” file for \s-1BS2000\s0 called hints.posix-bc (because posix-bc is the \s-1OS\s0 name given by `uname`) that specifies the correct values for most things. The major problem is (of course) the \s-1EBCDIC\s0 character set. We have german \s-1EBCDIC\s0 version.
Because of our problems with the native yacc we used \s-1GNU\s0 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 CW$1" shift done
# add flag CW%pure_parser:
tmpfile=/tmp/bison.$$.y echo CW%pure_parser > CW$tmpfile cat CW$1 >> CW$tmpfile
# call bison:
echo “/usr/local/bin/bison --yacc CW$params CW$1\t\t\t(Pure Parser)” /usr/local/bin/bison --yacc CW$params CW$tmpfile
# cleanup:
rm -f CW$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 \s-1GNU\s0 make. We tried the native make once and it worked too.

Testing Perl on \s-1BS2000\s0

We still got a few errors during CWmake 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 \s-1BS2000\s0

We have no nroff on \s-1BS2000\s0 \s-1POSIX\s0 (yet), so we ignored any errors while installing the documentation.

Using Perl in the Posix-Shell of \s-1BS2000\s0

\s-1BS2000\s0 \s-1POSIX\s0 doesn't support the shebang notation (CW#!/usr/local/bin/perl), so you have to use the following lines instead:
: # use perl eval 'exec /usr/local/bin/perl -S CW$0 ${1+“$@”}' if CW$running_under_some_shell; We don't have much experience with this yet, but try the following:
Copy your Perl executable to a \s-1BS2000\s0 \s-1LLM\s0 using bs2cp:
CWbs2cp /usr/local/bin/perl 'bs2:perl(perl,l)'
Now you can start it with the following (\s-1SDF\s0) command:
CW/START-PROG FROM-FILE=*MODULE(PERL,PERL),PROG-MODE=*ANY,RUN-MODE=*ADV
First you get the \s-1BS2000\s0 commandline prompt ('*'). Here you may enter your parameters, e.g. CW-e 'print "Hello World!\n";' (note the double backslash!) or CW-w and the name of your Perl script. Filenames starting with CW/ are searched in the Posix filesystem, others are searched in the \s-1BS2000\s0 filesystem. You may even use wildcards if you put a CW% in front of your filename (e.g. CW-w checkfiles.pl %*.c). Read your C/ manual for additional possibilities of the commandline prompt (look for \s-1PARAMETER-PROMPTING\s0).

Floating point anomalies on \s-1BS2000\s0

There appears to be a bug in the floating point implementation on \s-1BS2000\s0 \s-1POSIX\s0 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 $z is 100000
Although one would expect the quantities CW$y and CW$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 \s-1ASCII\s0 and \s-1EBCDIC\s0 partitions

Since version 5.8 Perl uses the new PerlIO on \s-1BS2000\s0. This enables you using different encodings per \s-1IO\s0 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 \s-1ASCII\s0, \s-1EBCDIC\s0, \s-1ISO\s0 Latin-1 (in this example identical to \s-1ASCII\s0) respective UTF-EBCDIC (in this example identical to normal \s-1EBCDIC\s0). See the documentation of Encode::PerlIO for details.
As the PerlIO layer uses raw \s-1IO\s0 internally, all this totally ignores the type of your filesystem (\s-1ASCII\s0 or \s-1EBCDIC\s0) and the \s-1IO_CONVERSION\s0 environment variable. If you want to get the old behavior, that the \s-1BS2000\s0 \s-1IO\s0 functions determine conversion depending on the filesystem PerlIO still is your friend. You use \s-1IO_CONVERSION\s0 as usual and tell Perl, that it should use the native \s-1IO\s0 layer:
export IO_CONVERSION=YES export PERLIO=stdio
Now your \s-1IO\s0 would be \s-1ASCII\s0 on \s-1ASCII\s0 partitions and \s-1EBCDIC\s0 on \s-1EBCDIC\s0 partitions. See the documentation of PerlIO (without CWEncode::!) for further posibilities.

AUTHORS

Thomas Dorner

SEE ALSO

\s-1INSTALL\s0, perlport.

Mailing list

If you are interested in the \s-1VM/ESA\s0, z/OS (formerly known as \s-1OS/390\s0) and POSIX-BC (\s-1BS2000\s0) ports of Perl then see the perl-mvs mailing list. To subscribe, send an empty message to perl-mvs-subscribe@perl.org.
See also:
http://lists.perl.org/showlist.cgi?name=perl-mvs
There are web archives of the mailing list at:
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl-mvs/ http://archive.develooper.com/perl-mvs@perl.org/

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.