You mean like LOAD ON CONDITION and STORE ON CONDITION?

They were added in the 9th edition of the POPS.

Robert Ngan
CSC Financial Services Group



From:   "McKown, John" <[email protected]>
To:     [email protected]
Date:   2012/11/26 15:39
Subject:        Stupid? though on a new "execute" instruction.
Sent by:        IBM Mainframe Assembler List <[email protected]>



It's the holiday season. So be nice.

There currently exist 2 execute variants. The old base+displacement and the
new relative. Now that we have 64 bit registers, why not have an RR
instruction where the first register the modifying value but the second
register contains the actual instruction to be executed. I have no idea how
the hardware actually works internally, so perhaps this would be a huge
kludge. But, then, at present the EX instruction must copy the referenced
instruction "somewhere" and modify it "somehow". So why couldn't it copy
from a register as well as from the D-cache? Or, maybe, how about an EX
which works like EXRL but the relative instruction is "hard coded" to be
the next instruction in line? The problem, of course, is that this new EX
would then need to "skip over" the just executed instruction. And I don't
know how to handle "interruptible" instructions. But EX can do it, so I
guess the same way.

Yes, I realize these are likely not of much importance. It's just that
there's nothing going on and for the rest of the year we are in "don't do
anything" mode so that month-end, quarter-end, and year-end processing will
be smooth.

OK, since I have you here anyway. What about a real weirdie? An instruction
which says whether or not to execute the next instruction, based on the
condition code? That would enable every instruction to be a conditional
instruction. Perhaps EXNC (Execute Next Conditional). What comes to mind?
Perhaps:
        SLR R2,R2
        LTR R1,R1
        EXNC NZ
        L R2,0(,R1)
        LTR R2,R2
        JZ  BADADDR
Which would load the contents of R2 with the address contained in R1 unless
it was zero. Or maybe (combining both of the above)
        L       R1,LEN LENGTH OF FIELD
        AHI     R1,-1   DECREMENT FOR EX
        EXNZ
        EXRI    R1      EX NEXT INSTRUCTION
        MVC     RECEIVE(0),FROM

Returning you now to your regularly scheduled, useful, email.

--
John McKown
Systems Engineer IV
IT

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