As Bruce has pointed out, this instruction continues to be available.
Moreover, it has a number of at least moderately obvious uses. For example,
many binary-to-decimal conversion routines generate digits in right-to-left,
least-to-most significant, sequence; and MVCIN can be used to reverse them.
(It is much cheaper than the recursive scheme advocated in a celebrated C
textbook for addressing this problem.)
More importantly, the comment
C'ABCDE' would be moved as C'EDCBA'. Very useful if you put a card in the
reader backwards, I'm sure, but I for one could never think of a real use
for it.
is fatally provincial even in more mundane contexts. Many natural languages
generate text in one of the last three of the four sequences
Left Left (LL):
------------------------->
------------------------->
-------->
Right Right (RR):
<-------------------------
<-------------------------
<---------------
Left Boustrophedon (LB):
------------------------->
<-------------------------
------------->
Right Boustrophedon (RB):
<-------------------------
------------------------->
<------
and for them, although not of course for LL and the standard Europoean
languages, MVCIN is very useful for formatting display or print text.
John Gilmore
Ashland, MA 01721
USA
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