Does anyone still use CLCL and MVCL? CLCLE and MVCLE have been around for, 
like, well over ten years.

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: IBM Mainframe Assembler List [mailto:[email protected]] Im 
Auftrag von John Gilmore
Gesendet: Dienstag, 16. April 2013 14:14
An: [email protected]
Betreff: Re: TRTE and new instructions

The notion that macro-based substitutions for 'new', and thus unavailable in 
some contexts, machine instructions are impractical in the 'real world' has 
become a shibboleth, used to distinguish practical people bent upon 'providing 
good service' from impractical, ivory-tower theoreticians or, worse, those 
having ulterior motives.

Schemes like this have a long history.  Marx himself was, for example, very 
sensitive to the logic of his opponents' positions, but his epigoni were and 
are notorious for instead 'exposing' their opponents'
positions as shabby, dishonest rationalizations of ulterior motives.

The objection to this sort of rhetoric is that it substitutes catch phrases for 
thought in a self-perpetuating cycle.

CLCL and MVCL are now old enough so that I seldom now hear them deprecated in 
this way, but arguments that CLC and MVC used iteratively were good enough were 
still very common ten years ago.

Technical problems require technical resolutions.  Rhetoric aggravates
them.   It is both possible and economic to implement macro
definitions that simulate a TRTE or any other machine instruction.
Efforts to do so are not, I suppose, problem-free; but familiarity with the 
technology makes such problems eminently tractable.

John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA

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