>I believe someone (Harlan Mills? Fred Brooks?) said that he felt the only (or >most significant?) *error* in the System 360 design was the 24- rather than >31- or 32-bit addressing. > >Anyone who has wrestled with legacy control blocks in the modern era would >probably agree.
Hmmm, if all those address fields in those nasty legacy control blocks were 32 bit fields, what would you say about the fact that they cannot hold modern era's 64bit pointers? Other platforms have had and have similar problems that resulted from decision that had to be made at some time. The *big* difference, IMHO, between IBM Z (or whatever it was and will be called) decided in favour of compatibilty. Other platforms decided in favour of dropping legacy requesting rewriting at least parts of the code every few years. I'm with the IBM Z approach. The limitations imposed concern only few (ISVs); Cobol, PL/I, etc programmers mostly don't have to care. -- Peter Hunkeler
