Talk:IBM Basic assembly language and successors

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BAL brings back memories

Latest comment: 15 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

         XC   CATS,DOGS
         XC   DOGS,CATS
         XC   CATS,DOGS
 
 CATS    DC   CL32'Now is the time for all good men'
 DOGS    DC   CL32'It is a far far better thing I d'

I loved those Boolean operators. Naaman Brown (talk) 00:22, 4 February 2009 (UTC)Reply

I love the Execute instruction. You could actually write a very complex program on a 16K machine. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.207.255.169 (talk) 02:49, 29 October 2009 (UTC)Reply

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… Jhlister (talk) 00:56, 12 February 2010 (UTC)Reply

The Difference between BAL and ALC

Latest comment: 15 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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.

24.130.152.247 (talk) 17:56, 3 April 2010 (UTC)Reply