I would mention in such a presentation that the MF is the only architecture that can reasonably pe programmed in ASSEMBLER language today, because the instruction set is clear and straightforward and defined in such a way that it is at the same time well performing on the machine and understandable to humans.
There is no other platform with existing applications in ASSEMBLER language doing business critical work. And, if done correctly and supported by people who have the needed skills to manage those applications, this is no problem at all. I also see just in the last few days, that there is another culture of testing and error recovery in the mainframe environment; we have component tests, regression tests, diagnose tools, dumps etc., and we normally are able to analyze the errors in a very early development stage and we find the source of the error in the programs by ourselves and very fast. The software on the other platforms is often tested only in a very late state, when the whole package is built, and we then have to cope with strange program interruptions and we get only minimal diagnose information which is not helpful - at least that's my experience. Kind regards Bernd Am 15.02.2013 20:57, schrieb Gibney, Dave:
I am doing a high (very high) level presentation for my managers who have no MF experience. I want a simple slide. Something like: IBM architecture is not RISC, there are nnn instructions. nnn Privileged nnn General nnn Decimal nnn Cryptographic etc. I've Googled and looked at some of the sites in the Dino ring including hlasm.com and haven't found it. I don't find a nice set of counts in Pops either. Anyone know of such a list(s) Dave Gibney Information Technology Services Washington State University
