Re: S/390 (was Market pressures for more reliable software)

[Randy Hudson <ime@netcom.com>]

In article <9hght3$c3s$1@hermes.nz.eds.com>,
 John Homes <John.Homes@eds.com> wrote:

> Some of us are still using it..

Before I used BALR, I used an even odder subroutine call, JMS on DEC's PDP-8
series (it was the same on the PDP-5, but, thankfully, I'm not old enough to
have programmed that one). The PAL-III assembler didn't directly support
reloation (object files were only loadable to the addresses they were
assembled to), but we wrote some helper routines that we could call as a
subroutine, which would update the relocation constants of the page from
which it was called, and then return to that page; the JMS instruction (it
stored the program counter at the pointed-to location, then jumped to the
following instruction) was central to that routine.

Modern computer architecture theorists would use the PDP-8 as an example of
how not to design a CPU.

SABR came out soon after that, which had its own methods for creating
relocatable object code for the PDP-8.

-- 
Randy Hudson  <ime@netcom.com>