4 ms·

your proposal changes behavior for EBCDIC

kijin 8y ago
According to the linked article, recent versions of gawk have already shown the middle finger to EBCDIC, by taking the liberty to interpret "undefined" as "we'll just go back to ASCII". It would be nice to expand that to the full UTF-8 range, though.
- pgeorgi 8y ago
  gawk, yes. I was referring to the POSIX standard declaring it undefined.
  - kijin 8y ago
    If the standard says the behavior is undefined, EBCDIC users can't complain if the standard later becomes defined in a way that is different from the way they've been doing it.
- laumars 8y ago
  Genuine question: does anyone actually still use EPCDIC (outside of hobbyists maintaining retro hardware)?
  - dfox 8y ago
    This question should probably be rephrased as "was there ever system that used EBCDIC in it's POSIX-compliant interface?" which I strongly believe there was not.
  - slavik81 8y ago
    From the "IBM comment on preparing for a Trigraph-adverse future in C++17" (Oct 2014): > There are real customers who use EBCDIC. We cannot reveal their names due to confidentiality agreements. One key example is some of the major banks in North America who continue to use IBM machines to perform check clearing operations. These high reliability software systems are written on IBM mainframes clearing your checks and because they have been debugged over so many years and are highly critical to daily integrity of the financial industry, they are highly reliable and will never be moved to any other platform. In a way, this makes their code unaffected by this removal of trigraphs. > Other EBCDIC users with trigraphs from a world-wide company that can’t get square brackets (i.e. [ ]) everywhere so must use trigraphs to get at them quotes: “In that capacity we have widely distributed deployments, around the world, across Windows, HP-UX, Linux, z/OS and iSeries systems. That's why we need the trigraphs, it doesn't seem you can count on the [ ] characters working everywhere. ... " Source: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n4210.pdf http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n421...
    - laumars 8y ago
      Interesting read however even that was 4 years ago. A lot of European banks have been making major upgrades to their IT infrastructure (for better or worse) in recent years so it wouldn't surprise me if a few of those EBCDIC systems have been torn out of American banks as well. However even assuming they are still in use (which is a real possibility knowing how slowly banks upgrade) I would be surprised if they depended on GNU Awk let alone undefined behaviour in its Regex library. I'm not normally someone who says "move fast and break things" but I do think this is one situation where it is ok. I mean EBCDIC is hardly recent and it wasn't exactly popular even when it was "current tech" (I seem to recall it was a bit of a laughing stock?)

According to the linked article, recent versions of gawk have already shown the middle finger to EBCDIC, by taking the liberty to interpret "undefined" as "we'll just go back to ASCII". It would be nice to expand that to the full UTF-8 range, though.

pgeorgi 8y ago
gawk, yes. I was referring to the POSIX standard declaring it undefined.
- kijin 8y ago
  If the standard says the behavior is undefined, EBCDIC users can't complain if the standard later becomes defined in a way that is different from the way they've been doing it.
laumars 8y ago
Genuine question: does anyone actually still use EPCDIC (outside of hobbyists maintaining retro hardware)?
- dfox 8y ago
  This question should probably be rephrased as "was there ever system that used EBCDIC in it's POSIX-compliant interface?" which I strongly believe there was not.
- slavik81 8y ago
  From the "IBM comment on preparing for a Trigraph-adverse future in C++17" (Oct 2014): > There are real customers who use EBCDIC. We cannot reveal their names due to confidentiality agreements. One key example is some of the major banks in North America who continue to use IBM machines to perform check clearing operations. These high reliability software systems are written on IBM mainframes clearing your checks and because they have been debugged over so many years and are highly critical to daily integrity of the financial industry, they are highly reliable and will never be moved to any other platform. In a way, this makes their code unaffected by this removal of trigraphs. > Other EBCDIC users with trigraphs from a world-wide company that can’t get square brackets (i.e. [ ]) everywhere so must use trigraphs to get at them quotes: “In that capacity we have widely distributed deployments, around the world, across Windows, HP-UX, Linux, z/OS and iSeries systems. That's why we need the trigraphs, it doesn't seem you can count on the [ ] characters working everywhere. ... " Source: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n4210.pdf http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n421...
  - laumars 8y ago
    Interesting read however even that was 4 years ago. A lot of European banks have been making major upgrades to their IT infrastructure (for better or worse) in recent years so it wouldn't surprise me if a few of those EBCDIC systems have been torn out of American banks as well. However even assuming they are still in use (which is a real possibility knowing how slowly banks upgrade) I would be surprised if they depended on GNU Awk let alone undefined behaviour in its Regex library. I'm not normally someone who says "move fast and break things" but I do think this is one situation where it is ok. I mean EBCDIC is hardly recent and it wasn't exactly popular even when it was "current tech" (I seem to recall it was a bit of a laughing stock?)