On January 25, 2018 at 10:57 AM Bernd Oppolzer wrote:
(snip)
I would like to add: Mainframe ASSEMBLER IMHO is the only Assembler language (or the only instruction set) where humans can write reasonably programs in. All other Assemblers or instruction sets lack the same user friendliness and orthogonality that this platform has from the early days of the 360 system.
VAX is pretty human readable, too. That was considered important at the time, though just at the transition away from mostly writing OS in assembler. But yes, RISC assembler programs are not so readable, and also x86 (for any value of x) are not so readable. (snip)
BTW: I know of an old PL/1 compiler (Multics), which did the same loop unrolling and outperformed ASSEMBLER programmers this way; my example goes like this: SUM = 0; DO I = 1 to 10000; SUM = SUM + I; END; PUT SKIP DATA (SUM);
Loop unrolling was a favorite example for the PL/I preprocessor. change to %DO and %END and you have an unrolled loop.
