On 19/08/2011 19:04 PM, David Cole wrote:
I hear all the time that "Assembler is hard". It is not hard. C is
hard; Assembler is easy. It's just the manual that is hard.
I also hear grumbles that IBM manuals in general are hard. I do not
agree. Many of them have improved quite a lot in recent decades. But
not the Assembler Reference. It remains mired in its initial design,
and for whatever reason, it has escaped a competent rewrite.
David Cole wrote among other comments the above 2 comments.
I agree about C hard, assemblet easy. I'm currently trying to rewrite a
DOS BASIC program into C. I'm a competent "non system level eg SVC"
assembler programmer. I find it very difficult to find the
"documentation" on how to write to a screen in C (Fedora 15) . If I was
writing the same BASIC program to run as a TSO command it would have
been completed ages ago.
I disagree about the IBM manuals. Almost 40 years ago I remember
CICS/VS 1.2 {1} , it must have been the only release that included no
new functionality, instead we got a completely rewritten set of
manuals. It was wonderful. It also I believe set a standard for for
future IBM documentation.
In relation to the Assembler Reference I neverhad a problem. Caveat, I
only referred to it when writting macros.
The "assembler" manual I would like to see rewritten is the "Principles
of Opeertations"
