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From: ken@argus.UUCP (Kenneth Ng)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.arch
Subject: Re: Was the 360 badly-designed?
Message-ID: <1017@argus.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 23-Aug-87 19:38:34 EDT
Article-I.D.: argus.1017
Posted: Sun Aug 23 19:38:34 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 24-Aug-87 04:07:06 EDT
References: <855@tjalk.cs.vu.nl> <2683@hoptoad.uucp> <916@haddock.ISC.COM> <1035@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Organization: NJ Instit. of Tech: TEIES Project
Lines: 28
Xref: mnetor comp.lang.c:3859 comp.arch:1888

In article <1035@bsu-cs.UUCP>, dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
> In article <1580@sol.ARPA> crowl@cs.rochester.edu (Lawrence Crowl) writes:
> >. . .one needs VERY good arguments to claim that the 360
> >architecture was badly-designed.
> No stack, small segments, nonstandard character set with holes.
> -- 
> Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  {ihnp4,seismo}!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi


Talking about holes, what are those characters between 5B hex and 60 hex
in ascii?  Surely they aren't part of the alphabet.  But the character
set has no meaning on architecture of a machine.  I've seen an Amadal
(which is an IBM mainframe work-alike) running UTS with an ascii
character set.  I'm pretty sure if you try you can get EBCDIC on
a DEC machine.  As for a stack, the 360 assembler is sophisticated
enough to write macros that emulate stacks quite well, I use them
all the time.  As for small segments, that's where I must agree.  Granted
I don't have too many data structures larger than 4K, but it is a bit
of an irritant.

What I don't like about the 360 architecture is a lack of a one instruction
load and/or store indirect.  I've written macros to do the job, but it's
still a bit of an irritant knowing that the instruction is not available.


Kenneth Ng: Post office: NJIT - CCCC, Newark New Jersey  07102
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