> I have written many tens if not hundreds of thousands of lines of > assembler, 390, x86, and others (mostly 390).
May I impose on your time with a digression? The absolute WORST assembler of the lot was IV-Phase. (Anyone remember IV-Phase? Combination minicomputer and plug-compatible 3270 controller? Bunch of Fairchild refuges, AFAIR. The 3270 display buffer was in main memory, so to display something on a screen, you just had to do a move. 8-bit bytes, 24-bit words, addressable by the rightmost byte. But I digress.) The world's worst assembler: - Symbols were only 5 characters long. - But only the first three characters were significant, so STORE and STOP were the same symbol. - There was no possibility of a duplicate symbol: the assembler just did a redefinition of the symbol. So not only were STORE and STOP the same symbol, defining both did not generate an error: References to STOxx just went from referring to the field defined as STORE to the field defined as STOP. - There was no possibility of an undefined symbol. Anything you forgot to define, the assembler just made it into an EXTRN, postponing the error (hopefully!) to linkedit time. Thank you. I'm done now. Charles ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
