Knuth's ASSEMLER is called MIXAL, because it was designed for the
hypothetical machine MIX.
There are some tutorials on the web for MIX and MIXAL.
The local symbols of MIXAL are described here:
http://www.gnu.org/software/mdk/manual/html_node/Local-symbols.html#Local-symbols
Kind regards
Bernd
Am 04.08.2018 um 16:23 schrieb Peter Relson:
"This isn't a 'real' branch-that is, we aren't going very far..."
Donald Knuth's assembler, which we had available in college in the 70's,
had the concept of a "relative label".
I can't remember if there was one name pattern for "forward" and one for
"backward" or whether you couldn't use it for "backward". It avoided
unnecessarily unreadable label names, and avoided the uniqueness problem.
And when used properly (i.e., well within a "screen" amout) it was
perfectly clear.
The label name was like "1R" for "first one ahead, relative" or perhaps it
was "find the first 1R label ahead", for example
J 1R
When used appropriately (as a substitue for all of these *+small_number
types of cases) it avoided the maintainability problems of having to know
how long everything was.
By the way, I still remember being amazed at a demonstration of producing
"N factorial" using IBM/360 assembler macro language (at least for small
enough numbers).
Peter Relson
z/OS Core Technology Design
