Talk:IBM Basic assembly language and successors: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 00:56, 12 February 2010

Revision as of 17:56, 3 April 2010

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There is a lot to be written about IBM System/360 and its successors. The jumps to 31 and 64 bit addressing. The migration of system calls from SVC (Supervisor Call) instructions, with the overhead of the interrupt handler to PC, especially for in-address-space services such as storage management. The evolution of secondary address spaces. Count Key Data disks vs fixed block (and the emulation issues). It goes on. One day…

[[User:Jhlister|Jhlister]] ([[User talk:Jhlister|talk]]) 00:56, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

== The Difference between BAL and ALC ==

My understanding is that BAL lacked the Extended Mnemonics of ALC. Thus one was forced to code BC 8,LABEL rather than BE LABEL. I suspect that BAL was provided by IBM to support BOS and BPS, which were the early operating systems.

Since C was not used anywhere I worked so I cannot address it, but I very much doubt that any compiled language can compete with well written assembler. The real heart of the matter is that companies were willing and able to trade cycles (and other resources) for an expanded work force. It is hard to train an accomplished assembler programmer when compared to a higher level language programmer.

From my experience (30+ years) as a mainframe systems programmer.

[[Special:Contributions/24.130.152.247|24.130.152.247]] ([[User talk:24.130.152.247|talk]]) 17:56, 3 April 2010 (UTC)