(someone wrote) > IHMO, the mnemonic for BCT was not well-chosen. > Better might have been DBZ > for Decrement and Branch on Zero.
That would be Decrement and Branch on Not Zero, DBNZ, and also DBNZR. Sounds too much like DEC to me.(*) I believe none of the S/360 instructions are more than four letters long, though. > As for the below case of BALR, clearly, there needed to > be yet another instruction :- (*) I was doing S/370 assembly programming for a few years before I first programmed a DEC system, a PDP-10 running TOPS-10. The DEC mnemonics are a little different, but the decrement and skip/jump are usual. Note that on the PDP-10, the JUMP instruction doesn't jump, the JUMPA instruction actually does, but usually JRST is used instead. -- glen
