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From: beal@paladin.owego.ny.us (Alan Beal)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Segmented Architectures ( formerly Re: 48-bit computers)
Message-ID: <670993603.114309@paladin.owego.ny.us>
Date: 7 Apr 91 03:06:42 GMT
References: <4919@lib.tmc.edu> <5277@ns-mx.uiowa.edu>
Distribution: na
Organization: The Design Committee
Lines: 21

jones@pyrite.cs.uiowa.edu (Douglas W. Jones,201H MLH,3193350740,3193382879) writes:
>People forget history so quickly these days!  The Burroughs 5000 and
>descendants all used segmented architectures, and they routinely handled
>two dimensional arrays as an array of pointers to segments. 

I say amen to that.  Being a former Burroughs programmer, I know what a nice
experience it was to program on these systems.  Invalid indexes and seg array
errors(due to REPLACEs or SCANs) were all caught by the hardware, and a
meaningful error message was returned by the MCP - imagine that.

>I never heard a Burroughs programmer complain about segments

Because you were usually unaware segments were even being used.  I guess this
was due to the reliance of compilers to do the job - never had to look at
machine language, and there was no assembler.  It is a shame Burroughs
Large Systems never really caught on because they were nice systems to
program on.
-- 
Alan Beal
Internet: beal@paladin.Owego.NY.US
USENET:   {uunet,uunet!bywater!scifi}!paladin!beal