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From: darrelj@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Darrel VanBuer)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: Re: Assembly VS HOL: Having it both
Message-ID: <2023@sdcrdcf.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 25-May-85 11:16:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdcrdcf.2023
Posted: Sat May 25 11:16:09 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 26-May-85 20:28:30 EDT
References: <417@wdl1.UUCP> <1295@ecsvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: darrelj@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Darrel VanBuer)
Organization: System Development Corp. R+D, Santa Monica
Lines: 23
Summary: 

I used PL/360 on my own for System Programming 10 years ago, but there were
two deficiencies, one minor, one major.
The minor one was that the opcode coverage implied by "conventional"
programming was fairly narrow, mostly branching, integer and address
arithmetic.  Other opcodes were written as procedure calls, and you were
able to define new opcodes easily.
The more significant one was the almost complete lack of system interface
support.  In assembler you have a large library of macros for system calls
(SVCs) and standard idioms. PL360 came without such a library, and its
register use conventions tended to conflict with those of SVCs, so it was a
little tricky to call the operating system.  I had my own library for these
things, but most of the systems calls became subroutine calls to short
routines which dealt with the funny register mismatches.

-- 
Darrel J. Van Buer, PhD
System Development Corp.
2500 Colorado Ave
Santa Monica, CA 90406
(213)820-4111 x5449
...{allegra,burdvax,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,orstcs,sdcsvax,ucla-cs,akgua}
                                                            !sdcrdcf!darrelj
VANBUER@USC-ECL.ARPA