PERLBS2000(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLBS2000(1)NAME
README.BS2000 - building and installing Perl for BS2000.
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 ver
sions, 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
We used version 1.2.4, which could be installed out of the
box with one failure during 'make check'.
bison
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
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 / skip
ping 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
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
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/reg
exp...........FAILED tests 483, 496 op/reg
exp_noamp.....FAILED tests 483, 496 pragma/over
load.....FAILED tests 152-153, 170-171 pragma/warn
ings.....FAILED tests 14, 82, 129, 155, 192, 205, 207
lib/bigfloat........FAILED tests 351-352, 355
lib/bigfltpm........FAILED tests 354-355, 358 lib/com
plex.........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.
Install
We have no nroff on BS2000 POSIX (yet), so we ignored any
errors while installing the documentation.
Using Perl in the Posix-Shell
BS2000 POSIX doesn't support the shebang notation
("#!/usr/local/bin/perl"), so you have to use the follow
ing 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=*MOD
ULE(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 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 check
files.pl %*.c"). Read your C/C++ manual for additional
possibilities of the commandline prompt (look for PARAME
TER-PROMPTING).
Floating point anomalies
There appears to be a bug in the floating point implemen
tation 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 num
ber 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.
AUTHORS
Thomas Dorner
SEE ALSO
the INSTALL manpage, the perlport manpage.
Mailing list
The Perl Institute (http://www.perl.org/) maintains a
perl-mvs mailing list of interest to all folks building
and/or using perl on EBCDIC platforms. To subscribe, send
a message of:
subscribe perl-mvs
to majordomo@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.
2001-03-18 perl v5.6.1 PERLBS2000(1)
