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

Revision as of 17:56, 3 April 2010

Revision as of 05:04, 19 July 2010

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

== "Hell World" does nto need savearea ==

The "Hello World" example stacks a new savearea. This is not necessary, because the "WTO" ("write to operator") eventually expands into a "supervisor call" hardware instruction. Supervisor call handlers in the operating system save and restore registers into their own savearea, not into the savearea pointed to by register 13 upon invocation. Savearea's typically are needed if routines are invoked by a CALL macro instruction, which expands into a BAL or BALR instruction, that invokes the required routine directly, without supervisor involvement (supervisor = operating system).

Granted, the "Hello World" program becomes amazingly simple even in Assembly Language if no (new) savearea is needed. If you want to underline the complexity of this language, peraps use an OPEN, CLOSE, PUT and DCB macro instruction instead. It is actually bad practice to make undue WTO calls, because the operator of a mainframe typically is a person in the computer center, not the user. [[User:Rbakels|Rbakels]] ([[User talk:Rbakels|talk]]) 05:04, 19 July 2010 (UTC)