From: Shmuel Metz on
In <huis7i12bi(a)news7.newsguy.com>, on 06/07/2010
at 09:29 AM, "J. Clarke" <jclarke.usenet(a)cox.net> said:

>Has most of the properties of a fixed-head disk

Google for FastRand.

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Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT <http://patriot.net/~shmuel>

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From: Shmuel Metz on
In <huiia5$2k1$1(a)news.eternal-september.org>, on 06/07/2010
at 06:40 AM, Peter Flass <Peter_Flass(a)Yahoo.com> said:

>If you want to talk *really* old assemblers, look at SOAP. The
>hardware had no core,

Ours did. But only 60 words.

>and each H/W instruction contained the
>drum address of the next instruction to be executed.

The next instruction did not have to be on the drum. It could be,
e.g., in core, in the Upper Accumulator.

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Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT <http://patriot.net/~shmuel>

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From: Shmuel Metz on
In <huii3u$u9$2(a)news.eternal-september.org>, on 06/07/2010
at 06:36 AM, Peter Flass <Peter_Flass(a)Yahoo.com> said:

>Of course that's effectively two programs - a macro processor and an
>assembler.

No way, Jos�! There may be assemblers where the macro processing is a
separate phase, but in the assembler that I use these days it's
integrated, e.g., a macroinstruction can test the length attribute of
a symbol.

>The PL/I preprocessor

Is a separate issue.

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT <http://patriot.net/~shmuel>

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From: Shmuel Metz on
In <hugkq9$u0t$1(a)speranza.aioe.org>, on 06/06/2010
at 05:10 PM, glen herrmannsfeldt <gah(a)ugcs.caltech.edu> said:

>Unless you are actually doing it. There are stories from the early
>days of S/360 about patching object decks by adding cards.

And before. It made maintenance a nightmare. Assembler was far easier,
even if the assembler was slow.

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT <http://patriot.net/~shmuel>

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From: Peter Flass on
Georg Bauhaus wrote:
> On 6/8/10 8:27 AM, James J. Weinkam wrote:
>
>> Nevertheless, it remains true that the assembly language programmer who
>> knows what he is about has complete control over the binary code
>> generated, although I would venture to say that few, if any, assembly
>> language programmers think of what they are doing in those terms most of
>> the time.
>
> Would this control include control over pipelines, parallelism,
> and possibly translation of assembly instructions to microcode?
>

Probably more so than with a(n) HLL. For example, if you're concerned
about it, you can organize instructions to maximize parallelism.