On Aug 6, 2012, at 20:38, Gainsford, Allen wrote:

> On 7/08/12 1:41 PM, "John Gilmore" wrote:
>
>> If different behavior is required, the better  thing to do is to
>> introduce a new, and newly named, facility that provides it.
>
Or, I would say, a new option for an existing facility.

> True enough.  The sad thing is that this approach, while far more
> backwardly compatible, can leave a translator (or any other tool or
> facility, for that matter) supporting a lot of "broken" behaviours
> indefinitely.  The translator, or facility, or whatever, can become a
> nightmare to maintain because it's so weighed down with the past.  It also
> becomes harder to use because the documentation becomes similarly weighed
> down.
>
The pity is there's so little evidence of specification or
design of HLASM.  It jes' growed.  A dreadful example is that
divide checks evaluating arithmetic expressions are not reported
as errors.  And I have an example where base and displacement
are successfully evaluated in an R[SX] instruction where an
S-constant with the same argument in apparently the same context
causes an error.

-- gil

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