Mike, People are free to use right justify and left justify in different ways. I covered the cases of eliminating leftmost and rightmost blanks using respectiively TRTE and TRTRE.
Chris, I have some different numbers; but if the thrust of what you are saying is that the behavior of millicoded instructions is model-dependent, I agree strongly. Worse, it appears to be [calendar] time-dependent. IBM apparently fiddles with the millicode implementations of these instructions on a continuing basis and in ways that affect their relative and absolute timings. Moreover, cache effects, mostly deleterious ones, are more significant for loops than for single instructions. On the other hand your situation with SYNCSORT may require you to be very largely model-independent in your choices of instruction sequences. I do not tend to avoid millicoded instructions because they are millicoded. Their deficiencies have, I think, been exaggerated. They get better over time, and they make use of facilities/instructions that we cannot use. They are not, that is, just stored code sequences. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA
