On Thu, 15 Jun 2017 18:18:47 -0300, Clark Morris wrote: >[Default] On 14 Jun 2017 14:57:21 -0700, (Frank Swarbrick) wrote: > >>I won't try to justify EBCDIC, but big-endian rules! :-) >> >Unfortunately, little-endian which comes from the same warped thinking >that went into the COND JCL statement seems to be ubiquitous. >Little-endian is illogical and a royal pain in so many ways. The >developers of it should be ashamed of themselves. > There's a lot of epistemology here. People firmly believe the scheme they learned earliest is Natural Law, whether little-endian vs big-endian or EBCDIC vs. ASCII.
In both cases there were in the day minor hardware economies to flouting established convention: programmed arithmetic could be done low-to-high and existing punched cards could be translated to EBCDIC with fewer gates than to ASCII. JCL COND isn't "warped thinking"; merely tunnel vision. An assembler programmer thinking of branching around a block of code if the CC mask matches thought likewise of bypassing a job step if COND matches. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
