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From: pes@ux63.bath.ac.uk (Smee)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: question of the day
Message-ID: <1726@bath63.ux63.bath.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 14-Oct-87 09:32:18 EST
Article-I.D.: bath63.1726
Posted: Wed Oct 14 09:32:18 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Oct-87 20:56:39 EST
References: <36500013@iuvax> <656@rocky.STANFORD.EDU> <1505@pdn.UUCP>
Reply-To: pes@ux63.bath.ac.uk (Smee)
Organization: AUCC c/o University of Bath
Lines: 15


Yuk.

Self-modifying code.  While I could just about believe in the need for it
in the old days, on my PDP-8, when if you were really lucky you might have
8K of core to squeeze things into rather than the standard 4K, now in the
days of cheap memory I've come to believe that people who write things like
that deserve whatever they get.

Our mainframe also does instruction fetch in two-word clusters.  However,
being a big machine it's got hardware whose sole purpose is to detect that
you have just done this and so to force a re-fetch.  To the best of my
knowledge, the only piece of code which makes use of this 'feature' is the
diagnostic routine which is used to make sure this kludge hardware is working.
Guaranteed none of the standard system and application stuff uses it.