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From: guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.arch
Subject: Re: Was the 360 badly-designed?  (was Re: Compatibility with EBCDIC)
Message-ID: <26312@sun.uucp>
Date: Sat, 22-Aug-87 22:30:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.26312
Posted: Sat Aug 22 22:30:19 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 23-Aug-87 21:39:19 EDT
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> >. . .one needs VERY good arguments to claim that the 360
> >architecture was badly-designed.
> 
> No stack, small segments, nonstandard character set with holes.

He said "VERY good arguments"; these aren't.

"No stack": what do you mean by "no stack"?  There are no "push" or "pop"
instructions, and the procedure call instruction saves the return address in a
register, but so what?  Nothing *prevents* you from implementing a stack.

"Small segments": what do you mean by "segments"?  The original 360 didn't have
any sort of memory mapping.  If you *really* mean "12-bit offsets", yes, that
may be a nuisance, but it's not an insuperable problem, and it may have made
sense given the design constraints of the day.

"Nonstandard character set": considering ASCII was relatively new at the time
(I'm not even sure to what degree ASCII *existed* in 1963!), this is simply
bogus.

"with holes": well, ASCII has holes, too; why aren't "0-9" and "a-f" or "A-F"
contiguous?
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy@sun.com