I believe that the PoOP should or could stay like it is, because the normal
use is not as a tutorial for learning ASSEMBLER or machine architecture,
but to make clear some difficulties or peculiarities of seldom used
instructions,
at least in my case.
For learning ASSEMBLER, I would use the following approach (and I do
ASSEMBLER
training and tried this approach out some times in the past few years):
first start with the "classical" 360 instructions and teach how to use
them and then tell
the people about the different hardware extensions (XA etc.) and how
these extensions
left their traces in the instruction set. It is IMHO sufficient, if the
student gets an idea, how
the large or Y instructions are constructed out of the classical ones.
To look up the PoOP
and see, what variants of instructions exist for LH - for example - ,
can be left as an exercise for the
student.
We don't need lots of people who are capable of programming in ASSEMBLER
language,
so we can rely IMHO on those who are willing to do some more work by
themselves
to learn the language. So we don't need a student's text book which
covers all the new
instructions. Instead, like I suggested above, a book with two parts
would be sufficient:
- the classical instructions
- the extensions of the architecture, and examples for the new
instructions,
as provided by the SHARE presentations on these topics
Kind regards
Bernd
Am 23.08.2011 13:34, schrieb David Cole:
Here is a typical PoOP paragaph:
For LOAD HALFWORD (LH, LHR, and LHY), LOAD HALFWORD IMMEDIATE (LHI),
and LOAD HALFWORD RELATIVE LONG (LHRL), the first operand is treated
as a 32-bit signed binary integer. For LOAD HALFWORD (LGH and LGHR),
LOAD HALFWORD IMMEDIATE (LGHI), and LOAD HALFWORD RELATIVE LONG
(LGHRL), the first operand is treated as a 64-bit signed binary integer.
Huh????
I think that the PoOP could be shortened by at least 25% if they
would just get rid of (and by "rid of", I only intend "reduce the use
of") such arduous nomenclature...
