On 2020-05-30 14:18, Boris Gimbarzevsky via cctech wrote:
Chuck, your post just reminded me of how I used FORTRAN to interface with my PDP-11 ASM routines when I was doing data acquisition as fast as possible on a MINC system. Perused my FORTRAN code about 6 months ago and had common blocks and a routine which took "arrays" which were essential chunks of PDP-11 memory that I'd use as data buffers and to access data in my ASM routines directly. Certainly a lot faster than doing function calls to get at this data but would now be looked at as very "dangerous" programming.
That's why my (long after retirement) interest is mostly in MCU programming, currently the STM32F7 series.
The processors have all sorts of interesting memory management hardware built-in, including storage protection, but few people avail themselves of it. For me, this allows this once-engineer to get back to playing with hardware without putting up with the nonsense of a massive operating system. I find that very gratifying in my dotage.
Cheers, Chuck
