I miss my original POP ... I think it was like a half inch thick ... maybe 3/4.
I know there are many here older than me, but my first assembly code was in 74.
It was all pretty straightforward back then.

Now I look at the doc ... and then I made the mistake of actually looking at 
the intel doc I linked ...
OMG

And I do remember that wording you quote below :-)  Never did figure out what 
they were getting at ...

-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List [mailto:[email protected]] On 
Behalf Of Michael Stack
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2014 3:23 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Redesigning the Principles of Operation Manual

Correctness is the most important, and most difficult to achieve, 
characteristic of PoO.

An example: in my nine-years-old e-copy of PoO, there is in Appendix A a 
section on sorting instructions (p. A-52 in my edition). The headers and first 
sentence read:

--------------------------------------------------------
Sorting Instructions

Tree Format

Two instructions, COMPARE AND  FORM  CODEWORD and UPDATE TREE, refer to a tree 
- a data structure with a specific format.
--------------------------------------------------------

The problem is that execution of CFC has nothing directly to do with trees, and 
anyone attempting to understand those instructions will be seriously misled. 
What follows is a pretty-much-accurate description of how trees are used in the 
sort assist, but comprehensibility is sacrificed.  (I should say that Dan knows 
of my concern, and this may well have been corrected in later editions.)

This comment is intended solely to point out how much more difficult it is to 
write accurate mainframe technical language today than it was fifty years ago.

Mike

At 12:09 PM 11/14/2014 -0500, you wrote:
>On 2014-11-13 20:28, Tony Thigpen wrote:
>>Something for an intern????
>
>I assume this was tongue in cheek!
>
>The most important attribute of POps is correctness. No offense meant to 
>interns, but I suspect that correctness would suffer if the POps was turned 
>over to interns.
>
>--
>
>Regards, Gord Tomlin
>Action Software International
>(a division of Mazda Computer Corporation)
>Tel: (905) 470-7113, Fax: (905) 470-6507

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